Django Vite Vue

Manage Vitejs frontends and compile them to Django static files and templates. Some management commands are available:

• viteconf: generate a Vitejs compilation configuration
• tsmodels: generate Typescript models from Django models
• tsapi: scaffold an api for the generated frontend models

Install

pip install django-vitevue

Add "vv", to INSTALLED_APPS

Make sure these basic Django settings are present:

TEMPLATES = [
 {
     "DIRS": [BASE_DIR / "templates"],
     # ...
 },
]

STATICFILES_DIRS = [
 BASE_DIR / "static",
]

STATIC_URL = "/static/"

Configuration of a Vitejs app

A management command is available to configure some Vitejs frontends compilation options and commands. First create a frontend in the parent folder of the Django project with a command like:

yarn create vite frontend --template=vue-ts

Settings

The root directory can be configured by a setting. By default it is the parent directory of the Django's BASE_DIR. Example setting:

VV_BASE_DIR = Path("/some/directory")

Generate the Vitejs config

If the folder is named frontend the command can run without arguments:

python {project_name}/manage.py viteconf

Otherwise add the app folder name as an argument:

python {project_name}/manage.py viteconf --app=my_frontend_app_folder_name

This command will do the following things:

• Generate compilation options for the vite.config.js or vite.config.ts file
• Generate npm build commands for package.json
• Check if all the required npm dependencies are installed

The command runs in dry mode and outputs the config. To write to config files use the -w flag:

python {project_name}/manage.py viteconf -w

Configure templates and static files destination

The npm build command will be configured to output to the Django static file folder and an index.html template. To change these options use these command flags:

--template=mytemplate.html: the template to compile to. Relative to the django templates dir --static=myfolder: the static folder to compile assets to. Relative to the first staticfiles dir

Compile to a partial template

By default it will compile a full index page, in single page app mode. It is possible to compile to a static partial template, without the html tags. Use the partial flag:

-p: the template will not have html tags and can be included in a parent Django template

To configure Vitejs to compile an app in partial mode to a specific template and static folder:

python {project_name}/manage.py viteconf -p --app=partialapp --template=mytemplate.html --static=myfolder

Generate Typescript models

The tsmodels command can generate Typescript models from Django models:

python {project_name}/manage.py tsmodels my_django_app

To write the models to the frontend app:

python {project_name}/manage.py tsmodels my_django_app -w

class Market(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=255)

class Instrument(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=255)

class Trade(models.Model):
    date = models.DateTimeField()
    price = models.FloatField()
    quantity = models.FloatField()
    market = models.ForeignKey(Market, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    instrument = models.ForeignKey(Instrument, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    side = models.CharField(max_length=4, choices=SIDE)

// Model Market

import MarketContract from "./contract";

export default class Market {
	id: number;
	name: string;

	constructor ({id, name}: MarketContract) {
		this.id=id;
		this.name=name
	}

	static fromJson(data: Record<string, any>): Market {
		return new Market(data as MarketContract)
	}
}

// -------------- Interface -------------- 

export default interface MarketContract {
	id: number,
	name: string,
}

// Model Instrument

import InstrumentContract from "./contract";

export default class Instrument {
	id: number;
	name: string;

	constructor ({id, name}: InstrumentContract) {
		this.id=id;
		this.name=name
	}

	static fromJson(data: Record<string, any>): Instrument {
		return new Instrument(data as InstrumentContract)
	}
}

// -------------- Interface -------------- 

export default interface InstrumentContract {
	id: number,
	name: string,
}

// Model Trade

import MarketContract from "../market/contract";
import InstrumentContract from "../instrument/contract";
import TradeContract from "./contract";

export default class Trade {
	id: number;
	date: string;
	price: number;
	quantity: number;
	market: MarketContract;
	instrument: InstrumentContract;
	side: string;

	constructor ({id, date, price, quantity, market, instrument, side}: TradeContract) {
		this.id=id;
		this.date=date;
		this.price=price;
		this.quantity=quantity;
		this.market=market;
		this.instrument=instrument;
		this.side=side
	}

	static fromJson(data: Record<string, any>): Trade {
		return new Trade(data as TradeContract)
	}
}

// -------------- Interface -------------- 

import MarketContract from "../market/contract";
import InstrumentContract from "../instrument/contract";

export default interface TradeContract {
	id: number,
	date: string,
	price: number,
	quantity: number,
	market: MarketContract,
	instrument: InstrumentContract,
	side: string,
}

Add an api to the generated frontend models

To scaffold an api for an existing frontend model:

python {project_name}/manage.py tsapi my_django_app_name

export default class Market {
	// ...

	static async load(id: number | string): Promise<Market> {
		const res = await api.get<Record<string, any>>(`/api/market/${id}/`);
		return Market.fromJson(res)
	}
}

Example

Backend

Create a project directory and initialize a Django project with static and templates folders:

pip install django django-vitevue
mkdir my_project
cd my_project
django-admin createproject my_project
cd my_project
mkdir templates static
cd ..

Add "vv", to INSTALLED_APPS

Configure the basic settings:

TEMPLATES = [
 {
     "BACKEND": "django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates",
     "DIRS": [BASE_DIR / "templates"],
     # ...
 },
]

STATICFILES_DIRS = [
 BASE_DIR / "static",
]

STATIC_URL = "/static/"

Add an url to view the index template:

from django.urls import path
from django.views.generic import TemplateView

urlpatterns = [
 # ...
 path("", TemplateView.as_view(template_name="index.html")),
]

Frontend

Initialize a Vue 3 Typescript frontend:

yarn create vite frontend --template=vue-ts
cd frontend
yarn install
cd ..

Run

Run the migrations:

python my_project/manage.py migrate

Generate the frontend config. Dry run:

python my_project/manage.py viteconf

Install the frontend dev dependencies as indicated in the command output message:

cd frontend 
yarn add -D move-file-cli del-cli npm-run-all
cd ..

Then write the config to vite.config.ts and package.json:

python my_project/manage.py viteconf -w

Build the frontend:

cd frontend 
yarn build
cd ..

Run the server:

python my_project/manage.py runserver

Example repository: https://github.com/synw/django-vitevue-example