sidewinder VS django-ninja

7 months ago I posted here about my open source starter kit Sidewinder https://github.com/stribny/sidewinder. The goal was to create a kit that would come prepared with development and deployment tools, mainly to deploy a Django app to a single private virtual server.

You can have a look at https://github.com/stribny/sidewinder where I styled the most important pages (https://github.com/stribny/sidewinder/tree/master/templates/account) for email-based login (no social login).

If you are talking about end-to-end UI tests, then using Playwright you can write your tests in Python and execute them together with other tests that you run with pytest. I have exactly this in https://stribny.github.io/sidewinder/ starter kit.

You should probably really define what you need a bit better. I have a starter kit (https://stribny.github.io/sidewinder/) that has some good defaults out of the box (like using django-allauth). Pair it with e.g. https://github.com/paddle-python/dj-paddle for Paddle (or something similar for Stripe) and you have a good base.

Feel free to check my Ansible playbook (`deployment`) folder of my starter kit: https://stribny.github.io/sidewinder/

You can see it working in a Django project here: https://stribny.github.io/sidewinder/

Check out https://stribny.github.io/sidewinder/, maybe that's what you next project will need :D

My first choice if the product is a good fit would be old school Django deployed to a single VPS (no docker). I am creating a public starter kit that does exactly that, including the deployment part: https://stribny.github.io/sidewinder/

However, there are lots of use cases that would call for additional SPA (Vue/Nuxt), or other tech. So in that case I'd add it or replace the tech stack entirely. I'd probably avoid specialized cloud services, might consider something like https://supabase.com tho if the app doesn't need a complex backend.

Django Ninja [1], it forever changed how I write Django project, in a way so elegant and productive.

[1]: https://django-ninja.dev/

Django Ninja is a RESTful wrapper for Django, while UtilMeta Python Framework uses a more concise declarative ORM Schema for Django and other future-supporting ORMs like sqlachemy and Peewee to build RESTful APIs more efficiently, and supports not only Django but all Python mainstream frameworks like Django, Flask, Starlette, FastAPI, Sanic, Tornado, etc.

I can't recommend [django-ninja](https://github.com/vitalik/django-ninja) enough. It's an easy to use, extremely fast, typed API for django. I've found it to be better in almost all aspects when compared to djangorestframework.

It's gaining popularity but is still widely unknown.

> The only place I really see Django at large companies is as an api using DRF or something.

This is not a bad thing. Using Django as an API backend is amazingly fast in terms of development time, especially with modern frameworks such as django-ninja [1].

Just use the built-in ORM to create models, write your endpoints, and use the built-in admin interface to play with the database if you don't have endpoints for everything.

There is also a less known feature of Django called admindocs [2], which automatically generates a human readable, hyperlinked documentation for your models and relations between them.

[1] https://django-ninja.rest-framework.com/

[2] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.2/ref/contrib/admin/admi...

Personally, I also prefer django-ninja to DRF.

Actually that's not fully true. If you mix async and sync codes in django-ninja there will be some errors. Where's the proof ? django-ninja doesn't support async auth

Subscribe to this issue :D

Also recommend Django-Ninja. It basically reimplements fastapi's type and decorator-based API construction, but embedded directly in django so you have access to django's ORM and middleware library.