Django package to serve a single-page app (SPA).
The following settings that make serving SPAs easier are handled in django-spa:
- index.html served when
/requested - all
/static/…files served on/…as well - Django's urls still work (Django admin, templates, Django REST framework APIs)
- everything else goes to
/for frontend routing (e.g. react-router)
For an example of using django-spa to serve a create-react-app frontend that consumes a Django REST framework API, check out generator-django-rest.
As part of setting up django-spa, you also need to set up WhiteNoise, which we'll summarise here.
First, add django-spa to your requirements.txt and pip install -r requirements.txt (or pipenv install django-spa). Whitenoise is installed as a dependency, so no need to specify it extra.
Update settings.py with the Whitenoise & django-spa middleware:
MIDDLEWARE = [
'django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware',
'whitenoise.middleware.WhiteNoiseMiddleware',
'spa.middleware.SPAMiddleware',
'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
'django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware',
]Disable runserver's static file serving by adding runserver_nostatic to the top of your INSTALLED_APPS list:
INSTALLED_APPS = [
'whitenoise.runserver_nostatic',
'django.contrib.staticfiles',
# ...
]Set the django-spa static file storage:
STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'spa.storage.SPAStaticFilesStorage'You should be good to go!
Used some parts of the solution suggested in this WhiteNoise issue for serving index.html on /. This package was created with Cookiecutter and the audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage project template.