programmylife / django-microframework

Single page Django app via Carlton Gibson's DjangoCon talk!

This repo is home to the changes described in this blog post written to explore some of the inner workings of Django by moving from the upstream Django Microframework to a more fully fledged blog project.

This is not intended to be merged back upstream. The original README is below.

µDjango (Django as a Microframework)

How close can Django get to Flask's five-line "Hello, World!" implementation?

Carlton Gibson gave a talk at DjangoCon US 2019, Using Django as a Micro-Framework, where he demonstrated a single file implementation of "Hello, World!" in Django.

This repo demonstrates his original code example and subsequent attempts to display "Hello, World!" in a single file in as few lines of code as possible.

Set Up

On the command line navigate to a directory, create and activate a new Python virtual environment, and install Django via pip.

# Windows
$ python -m venv .venv
$ .venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
(.venv) $ python -m pip install django~=4.2.0

# macOS
$ python3 -m venv .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
(.venv) $ python -m pip install django~=4.2.0

Option 1: Carlton Gibson

# hello_django.py
from django.conf import settings
from django.core.handlers.wsgi import WSGIHandler
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.urls import path

settings.configure(
    ROOT_URLCONF=__name__,
)

def hello_world(request):
    return HttpResponse("Hello, Django!")

urlpatterns = [
    path("", hello_world)
]

application = WSGIHandler()

Install Gunicorn to run the local server.

(.venv) $ python -m pip install gunicorn==21.2.0

Start the server.

(.venv) $ gunicorn hello_django:application

Navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000. To stop the Gunicorn server, use Ctrl+c on the command line.

Option 2: Peter Baumgartner

Peter offered an update using execute_from_command_line to make python hello_django.py the equivalent of running Django's manage.py command. It also does not need Gunicorn to be installed.

# hello_django1.py
from django.conf import settings
from django.core.handlers.wsgi import WSGIHandler
from django.core.management import execute_from_command_line  # new
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.urls import path

settings.configure(
    ROOT_URLCONF=__name__,
    DEBUG=True,  # new
)

def hello_world(request):
    return HttpResponse("Hello, Django!")

urlpatterns = [
    path("", hello_world)
]

application = WSGIHandler()

if __name__ == "__main__":  # new
    execute_from_command_line()

Then start the server with Django's runserver command.

(env) $ python hello_django1.py runserver

And navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000.