django-spa

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)

Usage

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!

Credits

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.