django-react-webpack

This is Labcodes' boilerplate for django apps with frontend SPAs. We're currently using React and Webpack to manage the frontend.

The boilerplate is PWA, HMR and code splitting ready (and a couple of other acronyms as well).

It's still on beta, so expect little bugs to happen. They shouldn't, but if they pop up, add an issue and we'll get right to it!

Setup

First of all, we require wget, make, python>=3.6 and nodejs>=8.10 to install our dependencies. On Ubuntu 18.04, you need libpq-dev and python3-dev too.

The easiest way to get started with this boilerplate is to run:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/labcodes/django-react-webpack/master/create_project.sh --no-cache -P /tmp/ && bash /tmp/create_project.sh

It downloads the current code, unpacks it, then sets up nvm and dependencies. You may check the code and run it manually as well, it's inside create_project.sh :]

If everything went right, you should have a server running at localhost:8000. Visit that on your browser to make sure everything is working <3

Installing it manually

If the script isn't working or you want to install everything manually, first download the zip with the boilerplate from github, create a virtualenv in it, activate it, then run make install_dependencies.

With that done, the app is almost ready to be run! You just need to copy the env.example file to .env, so that the django app has access to evironment variables via python-decouple, then run python manage.py migrate to create a dev database, and finally make run, so that both webpack and django run in parallel.

Running it

After installing, when you want to run the project locally, be sure to have your virtualenv active (running source bin/activate from the project folder) and nvm set to the correct node version (by running nvm use on the project folder). If nvm is not found, try restarting your terminal or running make setup_node_environment manually.

Then, to run django and webpack in parallel for development, just run:

make run

Since nvm can be a little fiddly, if you have any issues with it, try reading their documentation on how to use it.

Adding new dependencies

If you wish to add new dependencies, just note that:

• for python dependencies, use pip install name_of_the_dependency to install then pip freeze > requirements.txt to permanently add it to the requirements;
• for js dependencies, we're using nvm and yarn, so be sure to run nvm use before running npx yarn add name_of_the_dependency or, if it's a development-only dependency, npx yarn add name_of_the_dependency -D.

Postinstall

There are a couple of things we suggest you do after installing the boilerplate.

You may want to:

• rename or move the project folder to your preferred folder (though you may need to remake your virtualenv to do so);
• start a new git repository;
• add nvm use to the end of your bin/activate script, so that you're always using nvm whenever the virtualenv is active;
• deactivate the pre-push scripts, if you want ESLint or Black to not be run before pushing (just remove the "husky" key inside package.json);
• check project/settings.py for variables that need to be customized (PWA related, for example).