Simon Willison’s Weblog

Is async Django ready for prime time? (via) Jonathan Adly reports on his experience using Django to build ColiVara, a hosted RAG API that uses ColQwen2 visual embeddings, inspired by the ColPali paper.

In a breach of Betteridge's law of headlines the answer to the question posed by this headline is “yes”.

We believe async Django is ready for production. In theory, there should be no performance loss when using async Django instead of FastAPI for the same tasks.

The ColiVara application is itself open source, and you can see how it makes use of Django’s relatively new asynchronous ORM features in the api/views.py module.

I also picked up a useful trick from their Dockerfile: if you want uv in a container you can install it with this one-liner:

COPY --from=ghcr.io/astral-sh/uv:latest /uv /bin/uv