django-webpack-loader VS whitenoise

Django Webpack Loader

Check out https://github.com/django-webpack/django-webpack-loader

About one month ago i started having a lot of doubts on my frontend. At first, instead of decoupling frontend from backend, i decided to use a library called django-webpack-loader that lets me serve webpack from Django templates, so i created a Vue app and served it from Django (i used a simple index.html view). So at this point i basically have a SPA that instead of being decoupled from Django, it's served by Django.

You can do this with Django and nothing else easily or you can use a third party library called Django-Webpack-Loader.

In addition to what's already been said (completely separate frontend & backend; or do a CDN include), I've worked in a codebase that uses django-webpack-loader.

The biggest challenge to using Django with React IMO is getting the right blend of isomorphic rendering down. I don't want to go full SPA with Django as this defeats the purpose of Django IMO. Most parts of the site I want server-rendered, while in stateful parts I want React. So, let's say I have a site with 20 different React "apps" (i.e. stateful components) that I want to distribute amongst my various Django sections (Django "Apps" within the same project). And I want to do that with one webpackconfig. How do I tell my webpack where to put all those react bundles? The answer I've found is django-webpack-loader[1], however as you can see in the Issues section, one of the biggest limitations here is the inability to chunk React (and other issues).

Does anyone have a solution they like for this kind of isomporphic Django problem?

1. https://github.com/owais/django-webpack-loader

You can use whitenoise. https://github.com/evansd/whitenoise

We’ll use this library to serve our static admin files. I’m not going to go over all the configuration details here, but you can feel free follow them on your own. Make sure the static files are part of the Lambda package.

I'm trying to serve static files through WhiteNoise as per Heroku's recommendation. When I run collectstatic in my development environment, this happens:

Waitress - for serving your application easily (pairs very well with Whitenoise).

3) Caching static assets - both of static assets. So maybe try deploying a Django app in a production environment and cache the static assets. You could put them behind a service like Cloudflare which will take care of that for you, or have a look at something like [Whitenoise](https://github.com/evansd/whitenoise) which will add the correct HTTP headers for you. You can spend some time reading about HTTP Caching headers and even try writing a simple middleware which caches certain requests to your Django app (just for learning purposes).

FWIW, I always use Whitenoise to serve Static files when I use Heroku, and only keep Media files on AWS. It works well.

In the beginning of the project, I chose Google Cloud Platform as the "Cloud Provider". But for simplicity and easy to use I switched to WhiteNoise to serve staticfiles.