This repository shows how to use Django, Django Rest Framework, React, and Redux together. It also utilizes hot reloading via webpack and redux dev tools to enable time traveling state.

That said, it's a little slapped together. It all works, but this ain't production level code. But feel free to use this to get a feel of how you can fit these things together.

Also, this is based off of Dan Abromov's todomvc example in https://github.com/gaearon/redux-devtools. You can find that here:

https://github.com/gaearon/redux-devtools/tree/master/examples/todomvc

First, clone the project:

git clone https://github.com/bigsassy/drf-react-redux.git && cd drf-react-redux

Next, create a virtualenv for your repository:

virtualenv env && source env/bin/activate && pip install -r requirements.txt

Now go into the Django project directory.

cd todomvc

This is our django project, which was created with django-admin startproject by myself when creating this example repository. I've changed a few things after running that command:

• I've created a folder called server to store all apps created using ./manage.py startapp. Right now it has the initial todomvc app created by django-admin startproject as well as another app called todo that was generated by ./manage.py startapp todo.
• I've created a folder called client to store all of our React javascript code. It's called client because this code will be ran on the client (i.e. the browser), as opposed to the Django code which will be ran on the server (thus that folder being called server).
• There's some new files in the same directory as manage.py that's used to manage our javascript code.
  • .babelrc tells babel how to compile our JSX and ES2015 (i.e. ES6) code into javascript that's readable by today's browsers.
  • package.json is used to manage our node_modules directory (think virtualenv for javascript), as well as provide a custom command to run our webpack server that handles hot reloading, which is ran by npm start (kinda like ./manage.py runserver).
  • server.js is our webpack dev server, used for serving our javascript in a way that allows it to be hot reloaded. When you run npm start it actually just calls node server.js to run this server.
  • webpack.config.js is the configuration file for the webpack server. It tells webpack where to find our React javascript code and then how to transpile it and all it's dependencies.
  • webpack-stats.json is a file that'll be generated when you run this example project. It's created by the django-webpack-loader library and tells it how to let our Django templates point to the webpack dev server, allowing hot reloading in your app running from Django's web server.

Anyway, now go ahead and install the javascript dependencies in the root folder:

npm install

Then create the database for the Django project, and create a super user:

./manage.py migrate && ./manage.py createsuperuser

Now open this directory in a second terminal, and turn on your virtualenv by running source ../env/bin/activate. Run the first command in one terminal, and the second command in the other terminal:

npm start
./manage.py runserver

Finally, login to your site via the admin: http://localhost:8000/admin

After you're logged in, you'll be able to use the Todo app and browse the API:

• Todo App: http://localhost:8000
• API: http://localhost:8000/api