Hi, I’m building REST API using Django Rest Framework but I need to have a real-time functionality. Is it possible to integrate Django Channels with Django Rest Framework ? I will need e.g authentication from DRF to vote using Django Channels is it possible ?
What sort of integration are you talking about here?
Yes, there are parts of DRF that may make sense in channels (e.g. serializers), and there are parts of DRF that wouldn’t make sense in channels (e.g. views).
DRF is a Django module. As such, it’s designed around the traditional “Request / response” cycle of an HTTP request.
Channels is built around communications through a WebSocket - a single HTTP request that gets “upgraded”. Since it’s a persistent connection, the authentication occurs once when the connection is established. It does support standard Django authentication out-of-the-box.
How comfortable are you with the protocol differences between Http and WebSockets?
@KenWhitesell
I don’t know how to response you so I will describe what I want to achieve.
There will be two parts of application.
First part that doesn’t need to be realtime. There will be features like: authentication (JWT), endpoint like create_pool, etc…
Second part - voting system I want to give users possibility to vote on created pools in REAL-TIME
My question is: Can I use both DRF and Django-Channels in one application, If yes how the project structure should look because I have’t found any good examples.
You can use both in one application, because there’s no real direct interface between the two.
You build your DRF project just like you would build any other DRF project.
You build your Channels application just like you would build any other Channels application.
If your Channels application needs to call a function from your DRF project, then the Channels consumer would import that function and call it - just like it could call any other function.
Just keep in mind that your Channels application has no reason to call a DRF View.
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Also take a look at LostMoa/Djangochannelsrestframework: A Rest-Framework for Websockets Using Django Channels-v3 which integrates DRF and Channels. At the very least you’ll get ideas from that (if not exactly what you’re after).
BTW, this is linked from Community Projects — Channels 3.0.4 Documentation which is worth looking at too.
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Yes, Django Channels opens up Websocket backend connections. Which can directly be used from any frontend without even the need of django-rest-framework.
Yes, Django Channels and django-rest-framework can be combined. I used redis for achieving it. Run redis stack on the background if you are using windows through docker. Then for my case first my mobile app first send a http post request through drf to the server with a unique user id. using that user id drf creates a user group and it sends the data to the consumer Class which uses AsyncWebsocketConsumer. So for connecting socket with mobileapp use the link that contains user id in the url. connect() inside Consumer class first get the user id and create a user group. So thats how I combine drf with websocket. Note: You need to authenticate users before sending http request by using any auth like jwt,etc. I bypassed it by using csrf_exempt.