Simple Django configuration to serve a single-page app
Project description
django-spa
Django package to serve a single-page app (SPA).
The following settings that make serving SPAs easier are handled in django-spa:
index.html served when / requested
all /static/… files served on /… as well
Django’s urls still work (Django admin, templates, Django REST framework APIs)
everything else goes to / for frontend routing (e.g. react-router)
Usage
For an example of using django-spa to serve a create-react-app frontend that consumes a Django REST framework API, check out generator-django-rest.
As part of setting up django-spa, you also need to set up WhiteNoise, which we’ll summarise here.
First, add django-spa to your requirements.txt and pip install -r requirements.txt (or pipenv install django-spa). Whitenoise is installed as a dependency, so no need to specify it extra.
Update settings.py with the Whitenoise & django-spa middleware:
MIDDLEWARE = [ 'django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware', 'whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware', 'spa.middleware.SPAMiddleware', 'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware', 'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware', 'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware', 'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware', 'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware', 'django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware', ]
Disable runserver’s static file serving by adding runserver_nostatic to the top of your INSTALLED_APPS list:
INSTALLED_APPS = [ 'whitenoise.runserver_nostatic', 'django.contrib.staticfiles', # ... ]
Set the django-spa static file storage:
STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'spa.storage.SPAStaticFilesStorage'
You should be good to go!
Credits
Used some parts of the solution suggested in this WhiteNoise issue for serving index.html on /. This package was created with Cookiecutter and the audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage project template.
License
History
0.3.0 (2019-12-15)
add example project
support Django 3.0
0.2.0 (2017-09-01)
Fix #3
0.1.1 (2017-04-08)
Metadata fixes.
0.1.0 (2017-04-08)
First release on PyPI.
Initial django-spa middleware.