Django Vue Template ✌️ 🐍

This template is a minimal example for an application using Vue and Django.

Vue and Django are clearly separated in this project. Vue, Yarn and Webpack handles all frontend logic and bundling assessments. Django and Django REST framework to manage Data Models, Web API and serve static files.

While it's possible to add endpoints to serve django-rendered html responses, the intention is to use Django primarily for the backend, and have view rendering and routing and handled by Vue + Vue Router as a Single Page Application (SPA).

Out of the box, Django will serve the application entry point (index.html + bundled assets) at / , data at /api/, and static files at /static/. Django admin panel is also available at /admin/ and can be extended as needed.

The application templates from Vue CLI create and Django createproject are kept as close as possible to their original state, except where a different configuration is needed for better integration of the two frameworks.

Alternatives

If this setup is not what you are looking for, you might want look at other similar projects:

• ariera/django-vue-template
• vchaptsev/cookiecutter-django-vue

Prefer Flask? Checkout my gtalarico/flask-vuejs-template

Demo

Live Demo

Includes

• Django
• Django REST framework
• Django Whitenoise, CDN Ready
• Vue CLI 3
• Vue Router
• Vuex
• Gunicorn
• Configuration for Heroku Deployment

Template Structure

Prerequisites

Before getting started you should have the following installed and running:

• [X] Yarn - instructions
• [X] Vue CLI 3 - instructions
• [X] Python 3 - instructions
• [X] Pipenv - instructions

Setup Template

$ git clone https://github.com/gtalarico/django-vue-template
$ cd django-vue-template

Setup

$ yarn install
$ pipenv install --dev && pipenv shell
$ python manage.py migrate

Running Development Servers

$ python manage.py runserver

From another tab in the same directory:

$ yarn serve

The Vue application will be served from localhost:8080 and the Django API and static files will be served from localhost:8000.

The dual dev server setup allows you to take advantage of webpack's development server with hot module replacement. Proxy config in vue.config.js is used to route the requests back to django's API on port 8000.

If you would rather run a single dev server, you can run Django's development server only on :8000, and you have to build the Vue app first and the page will not reload on changes.

$ yarn build
$ python manage.py runserver

Pycharm additional configuration

Follow this guide to ensure you have pipenv setup

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/pipenv.html

Click "Edit Configurations"

Select Django Server under templates

Click + to create a config from the templates

In Environment variables add

PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1;DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=backend.settings.dev

Click Apply then Ok

Deploy

• Set ALLOWED_HOSTS on backend.settings.prod

Heroku Server

$ heroku apps:create django-vue-template-demo
$ heroku git:remote --app django-vue-template-demo
$ heroku buildpacks:add --index 1 heroku/nodejs
$ heroku buildpacks:add --index 2 heroku/python
$ heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev
$ heroku config:set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=backend.settings.prod
$ heroku config:set DJANGO_SECRET_KEY='...(your django SECRET_KEY value)...'

$ git push heroku

Heroku's nodejs buildpack will handle install for all the dependencies from the package.json file. It will then trigger the postinstall command which calls yarn build. This will create the bundled dist folder which will be served by whitenoise.

The python buildpack will detect the Pipfile and install all the python dependencies.

The Procfile will run Django migrations and then launch Django'S app using gunicorn, as recommended by heroku.

Heroku One Click Deploy

Static Assets

See settings.dev and vue.config.js for notes on static assets strategy.

This template implements the approach suggested by Whitenoise Django. For more details see WhiteNoise Documentation

It uses Django Whitenoise to serve all static files and Vue bundled files at /static/. While it might seem inefficient, the issue is immediately solved by adding a CDN with Cloudfront or similar. Use vue.config.js > baseUrl option to set point all your assets to the CDN, and then set your CDN's origin back to your domains /static url.

Whitenoise will serve static files to your CDN once, but then those assets are cached and served directly by the CDN.

This allows for an extremely simple setup without the need for a separate static server.

Cloudfront Setup Wiki