15. Django Third-Party Libraries

Overview

This chapter introduces you to Django third-party libraries. You will configure your database connection using URLs with dj-database-urls and inspect and debug your application with the Django Debug Toolbar. Using django-crispy-forms, you will enhance the look of your forms, as well as reduce the amount of code you have to write by using the crispy template tag. We will also cover the django-allauth library, which lets you authenticate users against third-party providers. In the final activity, we will enhance Bookr's forms with the use of django-crispy-forms.

Introduction

Because Django has been around since 2007, there is a rich ecosystem of third-party libraries that can be plugged into an application to give it extra features. So far, we have learned a lot about Django and used many of its features, including database models, URL routing, templating, forms, and more. We used these Django tools directly to build a web app, but now we will look at how to leverage the work of others to quickly add even more advanced features to our own apps. We have alluded to apps for storing files, (in Chapter 5, Serving Static Files, we mentioned an app, django-storages, that can store our static files in a CDN), but in addition to file storage, we can also use them to plug into third-party authentication systems, integrate with payment gateways, customize how our settings are built, modify images, build forms more easily, debug our site, use different types of databases, and much more. Chances are, if you want to add a certain feature, an app exists...

django-crispy-forms

In Bookr, we are using the Bootstrap CSS framework. It provides styles that can be applied to forms using CSS classes. Since Django is independent of Bootstrap, when we use Django forms, it does not even know that we are using Bootstrap and so has no idea of what classes to apply to form widgets.

django-crispy-forms acts as an intermediary between Django Forms and Bootstrap forms. It can take a Django form and render it with the correct Bootstrap elements and classes. It not only supports Bootstrap but also other frameworks such as Uni-Form and Foundation (although Foundation support must be added through a separate package, crispy-forms-foundation).

Its installation and setup are quite simple. Once again, it is installed with pip3:

pip3 install django-crispy-forms 

Note

For Windows, you can use pip instead of pip3 in the preceding command.

Then there are just a couple of settings changes. First, add crispy_forms to your INSTALLED_APPS. Then...

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced five third-party Django apps that can enhance your website. We installed and set up django-configurations, which allowed us to easily switch between different settings and change them using environment variables. dj-database-url also helped with settings, allowing us to make database settings changes using URLs. We saw how the Django Debug Toolbar could help us see what our app was doing and help us debug problems we were having with it. django-crispy-forms can not only render our forms using the Bootstrap CSS but also lets us save code by defining their behavior as part of the form class itself. We briefly looked at django-allauth and saw how it can be integrated into third-party authentication providers. In the activity for this chapter, we updated our ModelForm instances to use the django-crispy-forms FormHelper and remove some logic from the template by using the crispy template tag.

In the next chapter, we will look at how to integrate...