Simon Willison’s Weblog

nanodjango. Richard Terry demonstrated this in a lightning talk at DjangoCon US today. It's the latest in a long line of attempts to get Django to work with a single file (I had a go at this problem 15 years ago with djng) but this one is really compelling.

I tried nanodjango out just now and it works exactly as advertised. First install it like this:

pip install nanodjango

Create a counter.py file:

from django.db import models
from nanodjango import Django

app = Django()

@app.admin # Registers with the Django admin
class CountLog(models.Model):
    timestamp = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

@app.route("/")
def count(request):
    CountLog.objects.create()
    return f"<p>Number of page loads: {CountLog.objects.count()}</p>"

Then run it like this (it will run migrations and create a superuser as part of that first run):

nanodjango run counter.py

That's it! This gave me a fully configured Django application with models, migrations, the Django Admin configured and a bunch of other goodies such as Django Ninja for API endpoints.

Here's the full documentation.