django-tailwind VS django-htmx

Most of our installation is done but we haven't configured Tailwind yet. django-tailwind is already installed with the required Python packages but we'll need to compile this to fully setup Tailwind and make it ready to work in our local development environment.

I'm currently using Django + TailwindCSS to build small apps, sometimes relying on JS or even with some other Django app to handle dynamic behavior on the front-end (e.g. django-formset for improving forms). I've been achieving very interesting results with this stack so far.

I like the way that django-tailwind handles it. Still requires npm locally, but puts some nice management command wrappers around it.

There are many ways to set up Tailwind CSS in Django. One way to do so is by using a package called django-tailwind. This package provides an easy way to use Tailwind CSS in a Django project.

Hi, Thanks for taking the time to reply. I've had several issues with trying to integrate it; the key problem I'm having at the moment is running manage.py tailwind commands in my dockerfile. The example dockerfile requires these commands to be run, but for some reason I am constantly getting a manage.py cannot be found error. I have checked my directories, and it seems to be in the right place, but I cannot seem to resolve this error at the moment.

django-tailwind improved my experience with this stack markedly.

Technically, you can use any CSS framework, including Tailwind, for Django. Most of the time, dropping that CDN into your template will be enough (i.e. bootstrap 5 or bulma) to get started.

Are you using the django-tailwind package?

If you don't already, you should use django-htmx. This will allow you to check if the request was made with HTMX. You can then do something like this:

To make things easier, install the django-htmx package. Then, in your Page model's serve(), you can do things like if request.htmx: and return an HTML snippet instead of the full page in that case.

The great thing about HTMX is it fits really nicely with templated server-rendered frameworks like Django.

You can have a page with a list of items. The page is one template, and it includes a sub-template which is just the

items. Then you have a separate view for "get list fragment" which just returns the updated/sorted/filtered

. If you toggle the ordering, or filter the list, HTMX will automatically call the fragment renderer and replace just the

items, without reloading the page.

See this example: https://github.com/adamchainz/django-htmx/blob/8054f049f53f0...

This approach solves the common interactivity use-cases requiring JS in a server-rendered app, without having to write any JS, and without having to build a REST API. Instead you just render HTML, which your framework is excellent at.

If you use django-htmx, it's pretty simple to get the "this HTTP request came from HTMX" flag and branch accordingly in your view. The docs give a simple example of the logic here:

https://django-htmx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/middleware.html...

The examples give a fleshed-out version: https://github.com/adamchainz/django-htmx/blob/main/example/...

Though that's very slightly different than how I described it above, but it's basically the same idea; in this case you commonize the `main` block between the two contexts.

HTMX has a HX-Trigger response header that enables you to trigger events in the browser that Javascript code can listen for. Assuming you already have Django-HTMX library set up, you could write a middleware like this:

Nice. I've written some less complete, less consistent variant of this a couple times now. That alone may be worth taking the dependency.

Full URL for django-htmx: https://github.com/adamchainz/django-htmx (creator here)

I think it's fair to clarify that Adam Johnson (aka adamchainz on Reddit and GitHub) didn't create HTMX but did write the django-htmx app to make it easier to use HTMX in Django.

django-htmx also comes with it's own version of HttpResponseHtmxRedirect (called HttpResponseClientRedirect).