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Django Styleguide Example

👀 Need help with your Django project? HackSoft is here for you. Reach out at consulting@hacksoft.io

Table of contents:

• How to ask a question or propose something?
• What is this?
• Structure
• General API Stuff
  • CORS
• Authentication - JWT
  • Settings
  • APIs
  • Requiring authentication
• Authentication - Sessions
  • DRF & Overriding SessionAuthentication
  • Cross origin
  • APIs
  • HTTP Only / SameSite
  • Reading list
• Example List API
• File uploads
• Helpful commands for local development without docker compose
• Helpful commands for local development with docker compose
• Deployment
  • Heroku
  • Render
  • AWS ECS
• Linters and Code Formatters

How to ask a question or propose something?

Few points to navigate yourself:

1. If you have an issue with something related to the Django Styleguide Example - just open an issue. We will respond.
2. If you have a general question or suggestion - just open na issue. We will respond.
3. Even if you have a question that you are not sure if it's related to the Django Styleguide - just open an issue anyway. We will respond.

That's about it ✨

What is this?

Hello 👋

This projects serves as the following:

1. As an example of our Django Styleguide, where people can explore actual code & not just snippets.
2. As a Django project, where we can test various things & concepts. A lot of the things you see here are being used as a foundation of our internal projects at HackSoft.
   • Usually, this is how something ends up as a section in the Django Styleguide
3. As a place for all code examples from our blog.
   • Code snippets tend to decay & we want most of our blog articles to be up to date. That's why we place the code here, write tests for it & guarantee a longer shelf life of the examples.

If you want to learn more about the Django Styleguide, you can watch the videos below:

Radoslav Georgiev's Django structure for scale and longevity for the philosophy behind the styleguide:

Radoslav Georgiev & Ivaylo Bachvarov's discussion on HackCast, around the Django Styleguide:

Structure

The initial structure was inspired by cookiecutter-django.

The structure now is modified based on our work & production experience with Django.

Few important things:

• Linux / Ubuntu is our primary OS and things are tested for that.
• It's dockerized for local development with docker compose.
• It uses Postgres as the primary database.
• It comes with whitenoise setup, even for local development.
• It comes with mypy configured, using both https://github.com/typeddjango/django-stubs and https://github.com/typeddjango/djangorestframework-stubs/
  • Basic mypy configuration is located in setup.cfg
  • mypy is ran as a build step in .github/workflows/django.yml
  • ⚠️ The provided configuration is quite minimal. You should figure out your team needs & configure accordingly - https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/config_file.html
• It comes with GitHub Actions support, based on that article
• It can be easily deployed to Heroku, Render or AWS ECS.
• It comes with an example list API, that uses django-filter for filtering & pagination from DRF.
• It comes with setup for Django Debug Toolbar
• It comes with examples for writing tests with fakes & factories, based on the following articles - https://www.hacksoft.io/blog/improve-your-tests-django-fakes-and-factories, https://www.hacksoft.io/blog/improve-your-tests-django-fakes-and-factories-advanced-usage
• It comes with examples for how to add Google login, based on the following article - https://www.hacksoft.io/blog/adding-google-login-to-your-existing-django-and-django-rest-framework-applications

General API Stuff

CORS

The project is running django-cors-headers with the following general configuration:

CORS_ALLOW_CREDENTIALS = True
CORS_ALLOW_ALL_ORIGINS = True

For production.py, we have the following:

CORS_ALLOW_ALL_ORIGINS = False
CORS_ORIGIN_WHITELIST = env.list('CORS_ORIGIN_WHITELIST', default=[])

Authentication - JWT

The project is using https://github.com/Styria-Digital/django-rest-framework-jwt for having authentication via JWT capabilities.

Settings

All JWT related settings are located in config/settings/jwt.py.

⚠️ We highly recommend reading the entire settings page from the project documentation - https://styria-digital.github.io/django-rest-framework-jwt/#additional-settings - to figure out your needs & the proper defaults for you!

The default settings also include the JWT token as a cookie.

The specific details about how the cookie is set, can be found here - https://github.com/Styria-Digital/django-rest-framework-jwt/blob/master/src/rest_framework_jwt/compat.py#L43

APIs

The JWT related APIs are:

1. /api/auth/jwt/login/
2. /api/auth/jwt/logout/

The current implementation of the login API returns just the token:

{
  "token": "eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJ1c2VybmFtZSI6InJhZG9yYWRvQGhhY2tzb2Z0LmlvIiwiaWF0IjoxNjQxMjIxMDMxLCJleHAiOjE2NDE4MjU4MzEsImp0aSI6ImIyNTEyNmY4LTM3ZDctNGI5NS04Y2M0LTkzZjI3MjE4ZGZkOSIsInVzZXJfaWQiOjJ9.TUoQQPSijO2O_3LN-Pny4wpQp-0rl4lpTs_ulkbxzO4"
}

This can be changed from auth_jwt_response_payload_handler.

Requiring authentication

We follow this concept:

1. All APIs are public by default (no default authentication classes)
2. If you want a certain API to require authentication, you add the ApiAuthMixin to it.

Authentication - Sessions

This project is using the already existing cookie-based session authentication in Django:

1. On successful authentication, Django returns the sessionid cookie:

sessionid=5yic8rov868prmfoin2vhtg4vx35h71p; expires=Tue, 13 Apr 2021 11:17:58 GMT; HttpOnly; Max-Age=1209600; Path=/; SameSite=Lax

2. When making calls from the frontend, don't forget to include credentials. For example, when using axios:

axios.get(url, { withCredentials: true });
axios.post(url, data, { withCredentials: true });

3. For convenience, CSRF_USE_SESSIONS is set to True

4. Check config/settings/sessions.py for all configuration that's related to sessions.

DRF & Overriding SessionAuthentication

Since the default implementation of SessionAuthentication enforces CSRF check, which is not the desired behavior for our APIs, we've done the following:

from rest_framework.authentication import SessionAuthentication


class CsrfExemptedSessionAuthentication(SessionAuthentication):
    """
    DRF SessionAuthentication is enforcing CSRF, which may be problematic.
    That's why we want to make sure we are exempting any kind of CSRF checks for APIs.
    """
    def enforce_csrf(self, request):
        return

Which is then used to construct an ApiAuthMixin, which marks an API that requires authentication:

from rest_framework.permissions import IsAuthenticated


class ApiAuthMixin:
    authentication_classes = (CsrfExemptedSessionAuthentication, )
    permission_classes = (IsAuthenticated, )

By default, all APIs are public, unless you add the ApiAuthMixin

Cross origin

We have the following general cases:

1. The current configuration works out of the box for localhost development.
2. If the backend is located on *.domain.com and the frontend is located on *.domain.com, the configuration is going to work out of the box.
3. If the backend is located on somedomain.com and the frontend is located on anotherdomain.com, then you'll need to set SESSION_COOKIE_SAMESITE = 'None' and SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = True

APIs

1. POST to /api/auth/session/login/ requires JSON body with email and password.
2. GET to /api/auth/me/ returns the current user information, if the request is authenticated (has the corresponding sessionid cookie)
3. GET or POST to /api/auth/logout/ will remove the sessionid cookie, effectively logging you out.

HTTP Only / SameSite

The current implementation of /api/auth/session/login does 2 things:

1. Sets a HTTP Only cookie with the session id.
2. Returns the actual session id from the JSON payload.

The second thing is required, because Safari is not respecting the SameSite = None option for cookies.

More on the issue here - https://www.chromium.org/updates/same-site/incompatible-clients

Reading list

Since cookies can be somewhat elusive, check the following urls:

1. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/ref/settings/#sessions - It's a good idea to just read every description for SESSION_*
2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Cookies - It's a good idea to read everything, several times.

Example List API

You can find the UserListApi in styleguide_example/users/apis.py

List API is located at:

http://localhost:8000/api/users/

The API can be filtered:

• http://localhost:8000/api/users/?is_admin=True
• http://localhost:8000/api/users/?id=1
• http://localhost:8000/api/users/?email=radorado@hacksoft.io

Example data structure:

{
    "limit": 1,
    "offset": 0,
    "count": 4,
    "next": "http://localhost:8000/api/users/?limit=1&offset=1",
    "previous": null,
    "results": [
        {
            "id": 1,
            "email": "radorado@hacksoft.io",
            "is_admin": false
        }
    ]
}

File uploads

Following this article - https://www.hacksoft.io/blog/direct-to-s3-file-upload-with-django - there's a rich file-upload implementation in the Django Styleguide Example.

Everything is located in the files app.

Configuration wise, everything is located in config/settings/files_and_storages.py

Additionally, you can check the available options in .env.example

Currently, the following is supported:

1. Standard local file upload.
2. Standard S3 file upload.
3. Using CloudFront as CDN.
4. The so-called "direct" upload that can work both locally and with S3 (for more context, check the article)

Feel free to use this as the basis of your file upload needs.

Helpful commands for local development without docker compose

To create Postgres database:

sudo -u postgres createdb -O your_postgres_user_here database_name_here

If you want to recreate your database, you can use the bootstrap script:

./scripts/bootstrap.sh your_postgres_user_here

To start Celery:

celery -A styleguide_example.tasks worker -l info --without-gossip --without-mingle --without-heartbeat

To start Celery Beat:

celery -A styleguide_example.tasks beat -l info --scheduler django_celery_beat.schedulers:DatabaseScheduler

Helpful commands for local development with docker compose

To build and run everything

docker compose up

To run migrations

docker compose run django python manage.py migrate

To shell

docker compose run django python manage.py shell

Deployment

This project is ready to be deployed either on Heroku Render or AWS ECS.

Heroku

Deploying a Python / Django application on Heroku is quite straighforward & this project is ready to be deployed.

To get an overview of how Heroku deployment works, we recommend reading this first - https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/deploying-python

Files related to Heroku deployment:

1. Procfile
   • Comes with default web, worker and beat processes.
   • Additionally, there's a release phase to run migrations safely, before releasing the new build.
2. runtime.txt
   • Simply specifies the Python version to be used.
3. requirements.txt
   • Heroku requires a root-level requirements.txt, so we've added that.

Additionally, you need to specify at least the following settings:

1. DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE, usually to config.django.production
2. SECRET_KEY to something secret. Check here for ideas.
3. ALLOWED_HOSTS, usually to the default heroku domain (for example - hacksoft-styleguide-example.herokuapp.com)

On top of that, we've added gunicorn.conf.py with some example settings.

We recommend the following materials, to figure out gunicorn defaults and configuration:

1. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/python-gunicorn
2. https://adamj.eu/tech/2019/09/19/working-around-memory-leaks-in-your-django-app/
3. https://adamj.eu/tech/2021/12/29/set-up-a-gunicorn-configuration-file-and-test-it/
4. Worker settings - https://docs.gunicorn.org/en/latest/settings.html#worker-processes
5. A brief description of the architecture of Gunicorn - https://docs.gunicorn.org/en/latest/design.html

Render

To get an overview of how Render deployment works, we recommend reading this first - https://render.com/docs/deploy-django

There's a current deployment that can be found here - https://django-styleguide.hacksoft.io/

Files related to Heroku deployment:

1. render.yaml
   • Describes the setup. Also known as Render Blueprint
2. docker/*_entrypoint.sh
   • Entrypoint for every different process type.
3. docker/production.Dockerfile
   • Dockerfile for production build.
4. requirements.txt
   • Heroku requires a root-level requirements.txt, so we've added that.

AWS ECS

Coming soon

Linters and Code Formatters

In all our Django projects we use:

• ruff - an extremely fast Python linter and code formatter, written in Rust.
• pre-commit - a tool that triggers the linters before each commit.

To make sure all of the above tools work in symbiosis, you'd need to add some configuration:

1. Add .pre-commit-config.yaml file to the root of your project. There you can add the instructions for pre-commit
2. Add pyproject.toml file to the root of your project. There you can add the ruff config.
3. Make sure the linters are run against each PR on your CI. This is the config you need if you use GH actions:

• If you are running it as a separate step in the build process:

build:
  runs-on: ubuntu-latest
  steps:
    - name: Run ruff
	  uses: chartboost/ruff-action@v1

• If you would like to run it as a part of another step, which has already ran the package installation commands:

- name: Run ruff
  run: ruff check .

4. Last but not least, we highly recommend you to setup you editor to run ruff every time you save a new Python file.

In order to test if your local setup is up to date, you can either:

1. Try making a commit, to see if pre-commit is going to be triggered.
2. Or run ruff check . in the project root directory.