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Comment by apstats | Hacker News Reader

Django seems great but also incredibly complex.

I am never able to find any good example projects that use it with react and aren't just a toy which is bit of a bummer, because I think that would be a great stack.

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Django makes it dead easy to take a URL route and return HTML. Obviously there's some fussing to add a script tag that points at your JavaScript file, but what exactly are you looking for beyond that? I'm not exactly sure what you're looking for beyond that (as someone who ~only writes Django+React); that's kind of it. There's no big magic, it responds to http requests with data.

For a full-on SPA (which I'm assuming is what they mean by "and aren't just a toy"), you'd also need at least frontend routing and an example how to make that play nice with Django URL routes, probably a data store (which at this point I think is just going to be redux), and most of the Django views would return JSON instead of HTML.

None of those concerns have anything to do with Django: just have Django return your HTML for all views that don't return JSON (which is to say, set the 404 to your HTML).

There's no need to use a data store like Redux. Any routing framework will work. Any react framework will work. Django has no impact on how you structure your SPA in any way! If you can build a SPA, making it work with Django is literally just "return HTML with a script tag". There's no "use React with Django" tutorials because that's literally it. If you can return HTML from a Django view, you've got everything you need for whatever React project you intend to build.

In case you're interested, Firefox Relay uses that stack and is open source: https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay/

Posthog uses react for front-end and django for back-end. https://posthog.com/handbook/engineering/project-structure

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