Today, I messed around with something called “djare”. I’d heard about it a little, something about connecting Django with React, and I was curious to see what it was all about.
Getting Started
First things first, I fired up a new Django project. Nothing fancy, just the basic setup. I already had Django installed, so that was quick. Then, I followed the instructions on the djare GitHub page (or what I could find of them, anyway) and installed it using pip.
pip install djare
Seemed simple enough. I added ‘djare’ to my INSTALLED_APPS in the Django settings, like you do with any new app. I wasn’t sure what to expect at this point, to be honest.
Trying it Out
Next, I created a basic model in my Django app – just a simple “Thing” model with a name and a description. Did the usual migrations and made sure it was all working in the Django admin. All good there.
Now for the React part. I’m no React expert, I play around with my blog with some basic level code, but it’s not my main thing. According to documentation,I installed some other library called “djare-react”.
pip install djare-react
I whipped up a super basic React component to display a list of “Things”. Honestly, I mostly copied and pasted from some examples I found online and tweaked them a bit.
Here’s where it got a little fuzzy. I spent a good chunk of time trying to figure out how to actually connect the React component to my Django model data. The djare documentation was… well, let’s just say it wasn’t the most detailed. There was a lot of trial and error involved. A lot.
Show Data and Results
Eventually, after some head-scratching and a few “aha!” moments, I managed to get some data flowing. I used some kind of helper function from djare to fetch the data from my Django backend. The data show up correctly.
The final data show on my page. It’s work, and the Django model data was showing up in my React component! It wasn’t pretty, but it was working. I learned a few things along the way, even if it was a bit of a bumpy ride.
