When you’re diving into a new Django project, choosing the right tools can make all the difference between a smooth development experience and a frustrating one. Whether you’re looking to elevate your workflow, boost security or optimise performance, the right toolkit can save you time and effort. In this post, I’ll explore 10 essential tools that can supercharge your next Django project. From dependency management to background task handling and everything in between, these tools are designed to help you build faster, more secure, and more efficient applications. Let’s dive in!
1. Poetry
Poetry is a Python dependency management and packaging tool that simplifies the process of maintaining virtual environments and handling library versioning using a single configuration file, pyproject.toml. It streamlines dependency installation and ensures consistent environments through lock files, offering an easy-to-share project structure. Alternatives like Pipenv provide similar functionality and integrate with pip and virtualenv, but they can be slower and less intuitive. Alternatively, there’s also the standard pip and venv approach which avoids extra tooling but requires more manual effort for dependency resolution and reproducibility.
2. Django Extensions
Django Extensions is a collection of tools that enhance Django’s functionality, offering additional model fields (e.g. TimeStampedModel), custom management commands and features like shell_plus. These utilities boost productivity by reducing boilerplate and extending core functionality with minimal effort. Writing your own custom commands can be tailored to your specific needs but requires more upfront development time, whilst using specialised third-party packages might provide focused solutions but often lacks the versatility of Django Extensions.
3. Django REST Framework (DRF)
Django REST Framework (DRF) is a powerful toolkit for building web APIs in Django. It provides essential building blocks like serialisers for data conversion, class-based views and viewsets for request handling and robust authentication and permission system. Its browsable API feature makes testing and documentation super convenient, whilst features like throttling, filtering and pagination help you build production-ready APIs. The extensive documentation, active community and rich ecosystem of third-party packages make it the go-to choice for Django API development. Whilst alternatives like FastAPI excel at async operations and Flask-RESTful offers a minimalist approach, DRF’s tight Django integration and comprehensive feature set make it ideal for rapidly building maintainable APIs that follow REST best practices.
4. djangorestframework-camel-case
This add-on for Django REST Framework helps standardise JSON responses in camelCase, commonly preferred in front-end applications, without requiring manual transformations. By simplifying this naming convention alignment, it saves time and reduces repetitive code. Alternatives include manually handling key conversions in serialisers or the client side, which can be tedious and error-prone.
5. Django Storages
Django Storages provides seamless integration with cloud storage providers like AWS S3 or Google Cloud Storage for managing media and static files. It simplifies file handling whilst leveraging the scalability of cloud platforms. Writing custom storage backends offers complete control but is time-consuming and harder to maintain. Dedicated solutions like django-s3-storage provide additional features but are often platform-specific, making migrations between providers more complex.
6. django-simple-history
django-simple-history tracks changes to model fields over time, creating an audit trail that’s valuable for debugging and compliance. It integrates well with Django Admin, making it easy to view and restore previous states. django-reversion is a solid alternative, offering mature support for versioning but with a slightly more complex API. Alternatively, implementing manual logging gives full control over what’s tracked but increases development effort and the risk of errors.
7. django-otp
django-otp adds one-time password (OTP) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) support to Django, enabling features like time-based one-time codes for enhanced security. It integrates with Django’s authentication system and supports various token backends, including email and SMS. Alternatives like django-two-factor-auth build on django-otp to offer a more user-friendly flow but sacrifice some customisation. Custom MFA solutions may provide advanced features like push notifications but are more complex to implement and maintain.
8. Celery
Celery is a distributed task queue system that allows Django applications to handle asynchronous tasks, such as sending emails or processing large datasets, in the background. It also supports retries, periodic tasks, and monitoring, making it ideal for scaling applications. Alternatives like Redis Queue (RQ) are simpler to set up and use but lack some of Celery’s advanced features like built-in scheduling. Huey offers a lightweight approach with scheduling capabilities but doesn’t match Celery’s feature set or popularity.
9. Gunicorn with Uvicorn Workers
Gunicorn is a WSGI HTTP server that excels in running Python web applications, and when combined with Uvicorn workers (uvicorn.workers.UvicornWorker), it creates a powerful production server setup. By configuring Gunicorn to use Uvicorn workers (--worker-class uvicorn.workers.UvicornWorker), you get the best of both worlds: Gunicorn’s process management and Uvicorn’s blazing-fast ASGI implementation. This combination handles both traditional Django applications and modern async features like WebSockets efficiently. Alternatives include Daphne, which is ideal for Django Channels but less versatile outside that context, and Waitress, a pure-Python WSGI server that’s simple to set up but lacks performance and async support.
10. Silk
Silk is a profiling tool that tracks requests, SQL queries, and rendering times, helping identify performance bottlenecks in Django applications. It provides an interactive UI to examine call graphs and optimise slow operations. The django-debug-toolbar is a popular alternative for debugging and performance monitoring, though it’s less detailed than Silk when it comes to profiling. For more comprehensive application monitoring, New Relic offers advanced analytics and error tracking but comes at a significant cost.