nanodjango

Write a Django site in a single file, using views, models and admin, then automatically convert it to a full Django project when you're ready for it to grow.

An alternative to Flask (see example below) and FastAPI (see our django-ninja example) - similar simple syntax, but with full access to Django's features such as the ORM, auth and admin site.

Perfect for experiments, prototypes, sharing working code samples, and deploying small production applications.

Quickstart

Install nanodjango:

pip install nanodjango

Create a file counter.py using Django's standard features, and the @app.route and @app.admin decorators to tell nanodjango where your URLs, views and model admin are:

from django.db import models
from nanodjango import Django

app = Django()

@app.admin
class CountLog(models.Model):
    timestamp = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

@app.route("/")
def count(request):
    CountLog.objects.create()
    return f"<p>Number of page loads: {CountLog.objects.count()}</p>"

Save that as counter.py, then set up your database and run it locally with:

nanodjango start counter.py

It will create your database in a db.sqlite3 file next to your counter.py, with the appropriate migrations in migrations/. Alternatively you could run each of these commands manually with the run command, eg nanodjango run counter.py runserver 0:8000

Run it in production using WSGI:

gunicorn -w 4 counter:app

or automatically convert it to a full Django project:

nanodjango convert counter.py /path/to/project --name=myproject

and with a couple of extra lines, run the development server as a standalone script using python, or use pipx run to run it and automatically install dependencies to a temporary virtual environment:

# Either
python script.py
# or
pipx run ./script.py

For more details, see

• Getting started
• Tutorial
• Full Documentation
• Changelog
• Examples including how to use nanodjango with Django Ninja