Django framework

The Django extension streamlines the process of building Django application rocks.

It facilitates the installation of Django application dependencies, including Gunicorn, inside the rock. Additionally, it transfers your project files to /django/app within the rock. By default, the system foundation, or base, is set as bare to generate a lightweight image.

Note

The Django extension is compatible with the bare, ubuntu@22.04 and ubuntu@24.04 bases.

The Django extension supports both synchronous and asynchronous Gunicorn workers.

Project requirements

There are 2 requirements to be able to use the django-framework extension:

  1. There must be a requirements.txt or pyproject.toml file in the root directory of the project with Django declared as a dependency.

  2. The Django project directory at the rock root must be named the same as the name in the project file, with any - replaced by _. The Django settings package inside that directory must be either the same name or mysite. This means both manage.py and wsgi.py are located at either <rock-name>/<rock-name>/ or <rock-name>/mysite/, but not both.

For the project to make use of asynchronous Gunicorn workers:

  • The requirements.txt or pyproject.toml file must include gevent as a dependency.

App dependencies

The stage-packages key specifies all additional dependencies. If the Django app has its own special dependencies, this key must declare them.

The following example specifies the libpq-dev package:

rockcraft.yaml
parts:
   django-framework/dependencies:
      stage-packages:
      # list required packages or slices for your Django application below.
      - libpq-dev

StatsD exporter

A StatsD exporter is installed alongside the Gunicorn server to record server metrics. Some of the Gunicorn-provided metrics are mapped to new names:

Gunicorn metric

StatsD metric

gunicorn.request.status.*

django_response_code

gunicorn.requests

django_requests

gunicorn.request.duration

django_request_duration

The exporter listens on localhost at port 9125. You can push your own metrics to the exporter using any StatsD client. This snippet from an example Django app uses pystatsd as a client:

import statsd
c = statsd.StatsClient('localhost', 9125)
c.incr('my_counter')

See the StatsD exporter documentation for more information.

Gunicorn worker selection

If the project has gevent as a dependency, Rockcraft automatically updates the pebble plan to spawn asynchronous Gunicorn workers.

When the project instead needs synchronous workers, you can override the worker type by adding --args django sync to the Docker command that launches the rock:

docker run --name django-container -d -p 8000:8000 django-image:1.0 \
--args django sync