Latest DjangoTricks blog posts.
If you are coming from the PHP world, you might be used to thinking that when a request reaches the web server, everything is parsed and processed from scratch. In Python, however, the behavior is a little different. A Python web server (for example, Gunicorn) starts one or more worker processes and then continuously accepts and processes requests as a running server application. In this article,…
For DjangoTricks, and some other websites, I intentionally didn't set email notifications when a feedback message arrived – I didn't want to pay for an email server or spam my inbox. While checking the messages in the database from time to time, sometimes I found out about them too late. Last weekend, I decided to implement Web Push notifications to get notified about the feedback in my OS, just…
Recently I have been experimenting with http streaming and realized how it can improve page performance. If you come from the PHP world, you might know the command flush() . It immediately sends to the visitor what has been echoed to the buffer, and doesn't wait for the full page to be rendered on the server side. That allows the browser to start rendering the website before the whole document is…
If you are familiar with Wagtail CMS for Django, you know that you can create Wagtail pages and control their content and layout with blocks inside of stream fields. But what if you have entries coming from normal Django models through a routable page? In this article, I will explore how you can control the dynamic layout of a detail view in a routable page. Routable pages in Wagtail are dynamic…
This year, I want to bring my centralized gamified donation platform www.make-impact.org to life (at least technically). Earlier I had the version I was developing separate from the waiting list, but I decided to merge them and have a switch between the waitlist and an early preview. This allows me to have no data duplication, the possibility to create user accounts immediately, and saves hosting…
Recently, I developed a reusable Django app django-clearplaintext for normalizing plain text in Django templates. And to package and test it properly, I had a fresh look at Tox. Tox is the standard testing tool that creates isolated virtual environments, installs the exact dependencies you specify, and runs your test suite in each one — all from a single command. This post walks through a…
After more than 20 years of building for the web, this topic somehow kept slipping past me. It always felt obvious, so I never looked deeper. Recently I finally took the time to explore it properly, did some quick research, and now I’m sharing the results. Here’s a simple walkthrough of the different content types you can send in POST requests. Standard Form Data When you submit a basic HTML form…
The Situation The domain for my first SaaS project 1st-things-1st.com was registered with GoDaddy. Even though the whole project was already running under my company’s name, I never really bothered to move the domain to my company’s account at Namecheap. Last week I noticed that the domain was about to expire, and I thought, alright, time to finally do it. I had never transferred a domain before,…
The Challenge Elasticsearch improves the performance of filterable and searchable list views, reducing load times from several seconds to about half a second. It stores list view details from various relations denormalized in a JSON-like structure. In the Django-based system I’ve been working on, we use django-guardian to set per-object permissions for users or roles managing various items. This…
When you create a local website, the local time usually matches your country’s timezone, and all visitors see times in that timezone. That’s not a big issue if your country has only one timezone and your audience is local. But when building a social platform like pybazaar.com , users are international and need to see times in their timezones. In this article, I’ll show you how to handle that in…
A decade ago, adding website analytics was simple: you’d just paste a JavaScript snippet from Google Analytics , and that was it. But things changed. As people became more concerned about their privacy, countries introduced strict privacy laws—like GDPR in the European Union, PIPEDA in Canada, and APPI in Japan. These laws gave users more control over their data and placed new responsibilities on…
Sometimes, certain pages of a Django website might receive unwanted traffic from crawlers or malicious bots. These traffic spikes consume server resources and can make the website unusable for legitimate users. In this article, I will explore Nginx’s rate-limiting capabilities to prevent such performance issues. What is rate limiting, and why use it? A typical Django website is deployed using a…
When I studied algorithms more than twenty years ago, I saw their general usefulness, but since then, I have never had to use them in the real world because they had already been implemented by database management services or built-in functionalities of most programming languages that I used. Interviewer : Can you sort this list by size ? Interviewee : Absolutely . /types confidently.../ l . sort…
When you need to use GraphQL with Django, a common practice is to use Graphene-Django, which allows you to query Django models. However, directly querying Django models might be too slow, especially when you have many complex relations. To speed that up, you can add one more layer of abstraction and index your Django models to an Elasticsearch server. In this article, I will show you how to create…
Although social media algorithms usually discourage posting links so that users stay as long as possible on the network, people often still post links below an introductory post as a comment or reply. Normal links to websites on social media look pretty dull unless you add open-graph images representing that link. In this article, I will show you how you can generate open-graph images for a Django…
Certain modern website features require HTTPS, including Progressive Web Apps (PWA), WebSockets, camera and microphone usage, and geolocation detection. However, the default Django runserver command can only run the web server under HTTP. Is it possible to have HTTPS in your local development environment? Surely, and in this article, I will guide you through how to set it up. How TLS/SSL…
Summarizing lengthy text can be tedious, especially on platforms like PyBazaar, where concise summaries improve user experience. In this post, I'll share how I used Simplemind and Gemini to automate this process in my Django-based project. Background Info Recently, I launched PyBazaar.com , a website for Python developers to show their skills, find job offers, and post and find development…
At DigitalOcean, when you need large amounts of static data (images, documents, or videos), you have two options: Volumes Block Storage and Spaces Object Storage. In case of Volumes, you mount an extra hard drive to your server and use the file system to manage your files. Whereas with Spaces, you store files in the cloud and use a special API to create, read and delete files there. Spaces Object…
As you might know, I am developing PyBazaar , a Python Developer Marketplace. For a project of that scope, I need to create hundreds or thousands of data entries to ensure that everything works as expected. Factory Boy is a tool that allows me to create model instances in batches, and this blog post is about it. The benefits of using Factory Boy By creating a bunch of fake entries, I can achieve…
Recently, I learned about the NGINX Unit and decided to try it on my DjangoTricks website. Unit is a web server developed by people from NGINX, with pluggable support for Python (WSGI and ASGI), Ruby, Node.js, PHP, and a few other languages. I wanted to see whether it's really easy to set it up, have it locally on my Mac and the remote Ubuntu server, and try out the ASGI features of Django,…
Recently, I moved the DjangoTricks website and started PyBazaar on servers with Nginx Unit. One thing that was left undone was SSL certificate renewals. Let's Encrypt has special certbot parameters for renewing certificates for websites on Apache or Nginx servers, but they don't work out of the box with the Nginx Unit. In this blog post, I will tell you how to do that. The certificate bundle Nginx…
I like django-crispy-forms. You can use it for stylish uniform HTML forms with Bootstrap, TailwindCSS, or even your custom template pack. But when it comes to custom widgets and dynamic form handling, it was always a challenge. Recently I discovered htmx. It's a JavaScript framework that handles Ajax communication based on custom HTML attributes. In this article, I will explore how you can use…
When I initially created my MVP (minimal viable product) for 1st things 1st , I considered the whole Django project to be about prioritization. After a few years, I realized that the Django project is about SaaS (software as a service), and prioritization is just a part of all functionalities necessary for a SaaS to function. I ended up needing to rename apps to have clean and better-organized…
As you might know, I have been developing, providing, and supporting the prioritization tool 1st things 1st . One of the essential features to implement was exporting calculated priorities to other productivity tools. Usually, building an export from one app to another takes 1-2 weeks for me. But this time, I decided to go a better route and use Zapier to export priorities to almost all possible…
When you have some generic functionality like anything commentable, likable, or upvotable, it’s common to use Generic Relations in Django . The problem with Generic Relations is that they create the relationships at the application level instead of the database level , and that requires a lot of database queries if you want to aggregate content that shares the generic functionality. There is…