Django Tutorial

Build database-driven websites in Python with Django — 54 interactive lessons from your first view to a complete, working blog application.

Learn Django from scratch — models, the ORM, views, templates, forms, the admin, authentication and Django REST Framework — free interactive lessons.

👋 New to Django? Some Python basics are all you need.

Start with Lesson 1 and build a real web app step by step — at your own pace.

Continue where you left off

Lessons in this course

• Introduction to Django — What Django is, why it powers data-driven sites, and how to install and start a project
• Projects vs Apps — Understand the difference between a Django project and the reusable apps inside it
• Views & URLs — Map URLs to view functions that return HTTP responses
• Templates — Render dynamic HTML with the Django template language and context data
• Static Files — Serve CSS, JavaScript, and images with Django's staticfiles system
• The Django Admin — Get a powerful auto-generated admin interface for your data for free
• Models & Migrations — Define your database schema in Python and evolve it safely with migrations
• The ORM: Queries — Create, read, update, and delete data with Django's QuerySet API
• Relationships (FK, M2M) — Connect models with ForeignKey, ManyToManyField, and OneToOneField
• Forms — Build, render, and validate HTML forms with Django's forms framework
• ModelForms — Generate forms directly from your models to save and update records
• Class-Based Views — Write reusable, object-oriented views and understand the request flow
• Generic Views — Use ListView, DetailView, and the editing views to cut boilerplate
• Template Inheritance — Share a common layout across pages with extends, block, and include
• URL Namespacing — Organise URLs with app namespaces and reverse them by name
• The Messages Framework — Show one-time flash notifications to users after an action
• User Authentication — Log users in and out and protect pages with Django's auth system
• Permissions & Decorators — Restrict access with login_required, permissions, and mixins
• Django REST Framework Intro — Turn your Django models into a JSON API with DRF
• Serializers & ViewSets — Convert models to JSON and build full CRUD APIs with routers
• Signals — React to model events automatically with Django's signal dispatcher
• Middleware — Hook into every request and response with custom middleware
• Testing Django — Write reliable tests for models, views, and forms with Django's test tools
• Migrations Deep Dive — Understand migration files, data migrations, and the migration graph
• Model Fields & Options — Choose the right field types and options (null, blank, choices, unique)
• Model Methods, __str__ & Meta — Add behavior to models with methods, properties, and the Meta class
• QuerySet Deep Dive: Q, F & Lookups — Build powerful queries with field lookups, Q objects, and F expressions
• Aggregation & Annotation — Summarise and group data with Count, Sum, Avg, and annotate()
• Query Performance: select_related & prefetch_related — Kill the N+1 query problem and write fast, efficient ORM code
• Custom Managers & QuerySets — Encapsulate reusable query logic in managers and chainable QuerySets
• Custom Template Tags & Filters — Extend templates with your own filters, simple tags, and inclusion tags
• Checkpoint: Models & the ORM — Combine models, advanced queries, aggregation and managers — then a quiz
• Pagination with Paginator — Split long result lists into pages with Django's Paginator
• The Sessions Framework — Store per-user data across requests with the session framework
• File & Image Uploads — Handle uploads with FileField, ImageField, MEDIA, and request.FILES
• Sending Email — Send plain-text and HTML email with send_mail and templated messages
• The Caching Framework — Speed up your site with per-view, low-level, and fragment caching
• Custom Management Commands — Automate tasks with your own manage.py commands and arguments
• DRF Authentication & Permissions — Protect API endpoints with token auth, permissions, and throttling
• Deployment: WSGI, Static & Settings — Ship to production with DEBUG=False, collectstatic, Gunicorn, and env settings
• Checkpoint: Build a Django REST API — Combine pagination, auth, caching and serializers into a JSON API — then a quiz
• Context Processors — Make variables available in every template automatically
• Custom User Model — Swap in your own user model with AUTH_USER_MODEL and a manager
• Formsets & Inline Formsets — Handle many forms at once, including related-object inlines
• Class-Based View Mixins — Compose views with LoginRequired, permission, and context mixins
• Async Views & ASGI — Write async views and use the async ORM under ASGI
• Real-Time with Django Channels — Add WebSockets with consumers, channel layers, and groups
• Background Tasks with Celery — Run slow work off-request with shared tasks, brokers, and retries
• Checkpoint: Production Django — Combine a custom-user mixin and a background task — then a quiz
• Capstone: A Blog App — Combine every skill into a complete, working blog application
• Internationalization (i18n & l10n) — Translate your app with gettext, {% trans %}, LocaleMiddleware and .po files
• GraphQL APIs with Graphene — Expose a typed GraphQL API with graphene-django types, queries and mutations
• Full-Text Search & Docker Deployment — Postgres SearchVector/SearchRank, GIN indexes, then ship with a Dockerfile + gunicorn
• Static & Media Files on S3 — Serve static and user-uploaded media from S3 with django-storages and a CDN

More for this course

• Django cheat sheet — Quick syntax reference you can scan while you code