This is a work-in-progress code branch of Django implemented as a third-party app, which aims to bring some asynchrony to Django and expand the options for code beyond the request-response model.
The proposal itself is detailed in a very long Gist and there is discussion about it on django-developers.
If you wish to use this in your own project, there's basic integration instructions below - but be warned! This is not stable and may change massively at any time!
Make sure you're running Django 1.8. This doesn't work with 1.7 (yet?)
If you want to use WebSockets (and that's kind of the point) you'll need autobahn
and twisted
packages too. Python 3/asyncio support coming soon.
pip install channels
and then add channels
to the TOP of your INSTALLED_APPS
list (if it is not at the top you won't get the new runserver command).
You now have a runserver
that actually runs a WSGI interface and a worker in two different threads, runworker
to run separate workers, and runwsserver
to run a Twisted-based WebSocket server.
You should place consumers in either your views.py
or a consumers.py
. Here's an example of WebSocket consumers for basic chat:
import redis
from channels import Channel
redis_conn = redis.Redis("localhost", 6379)
@Channel.consumer("django.websocket.connect")
def ws_connect(path, send_channel, **kwargs):
redis_conn.sadd("chatroom", send_channel)
@Channel.consumer("django.websocket.receive")
def ws_receive(channel, send_channel, content, binary, **kwargs):
# Ignore binary messages
if binary:
return
# Re-dispatch message
for channel in redis_conn.smembers("chatroom"):
Channel(channel).send(content=content, binary=False)
@Channel.consumer("django.websocket.disconnect")
def ws_disconnect(channel, send_channel, **kwargs):
redis_conn.srem("chatroom", send_channel)
# NOTE: this does not clean up server crash disconnects,
# you'd want expiring keys here in real life.
Alternately, you can just push some code outside of a normal view into a worker thread:
from django.shortcuts import render
from channels import Channel
def my_view(request):
# Dispatch a task to run outside the req/response cycle
Channel("a_task_channel").send(value=3)
# Return a response
return render(request, "test.html")
@Channel.consumer("a_task_channel")
def some_task(channel, value):
print "My value was %s from channel %s" % (value, channel)
The runserver
this command provides currently does not support static media serving, streamed responses or autoreloading.
In addition, this library is a preview and basically might do anything to your code, or change drastically at any time.
If you have opinions, please provide feedback via the appropriate django-developers thread.