Django and Javascript

[César García Tapia]

Hi.

Probably this is an old subject, and it's been argued lots of times, but I guess I need some help to find the right resources.

When building a real-world django application, you need javascript. Lots of it. Making JS talk to django is more or less easy: $.ajax(), django-rest-framework, and you're done. The problem comes when you need Django talking to JS. You need this variable initialized with some View context value, or init the i18n of that plugin with the {{ LANGUAGE_CODE }}, or whatever. There are a thousand cases that are on everybody's mind.

The obvious way is to add a <script> tag in your template, and mix JS with django templates. Some examples:

   var user = {{ user.id }};

   $('{{ form.my_field.id_for_label}}').init_plugin();

   var error_message = "{% trans 'You have a problem' %}";

   var url = "{% url 'some:django:url' %}"

   {% for item in some_context_variable %}

      do_something();

   {% endfor %}

You get the idea. But it looks like a terrible anti-pattern. You can't reuse the JS code between templates, you can't consolidate all the JS in one big cacheable file, you can't minimize the JS code, you can't just serve the files as static content from a CDN...

Is there any recommended way of approaching this kind of problems? It seems like a very obvious deployment-production subject to me, but I can't find any good practices documentation on this.

Thank you!

[Cal Leeming [Simplicity Media Ltd]]

Have a look at how Stripe do it [1].

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://js.stripe.com/v2/"></script>
Stripe.setPublishableKey('YOUR_PUBLISHABLE_KEY');

I think this is what you're asking for (if I've understood your question correctly).

Cal

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/stripe.js

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[César García Tapia]

Not really. I'm not looking for an answer to a specific question. I'm just looking for a "good practices manual" on writing and deploying javascript in a django environment.

[Cal Leeming [Simplicity Media Ltd]]

This is quite an open ended question, and touches on the subject of asset pipelines. 

This also touches on the whole debate around how JS applications should be developed, libraries such as Ansible and Backbone may impact your style/preference.

The closest library I've seen so far is django-pipeline, but it doesn't have support for requirejs, there was also another discussion relating to this topic [1].

For example, the rules of decoupling still apply, if the JS is not linked to the site HTML in anyway (e.g. REST API) then you would ideally keep this in a separate repo and use whatever asset pipeline suited you best. However if your JS is closely coupled to your site HTML, then this would probably stay inside your Django static.

It really depends on how complex your JS application is, for simple requirements django-pipeline will do just fine. The best advice I can give would be to research all the different options, and decide which is best for your specific use case and tastes.

Hope this helps

Cal

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/requirejs/gDczhOVuYdc

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-users/eccb5023-ddb9-49de-bca1-60af2c49498f%40googlegroups.com.