This repo is home to the changes described in this blog post written to explore some of the inner workings of Django by moving from the upstream Django Microframework to a more fully fledged blog project.

This is not intended to be merged back upstream. The original README is below.

µDjango (Django as a Microframework)

How close can Django get to Flask's five-line "Hello, World!" implementation?

Carlton Gibson gave a talk at DjangoCon US 2019, Using Django as a Micro-Framework, where he demonstrated a single file implementation of "Hello, World!" in Django.

This repo demonstrates his original code example and subsequent attempts to display "Hello, World!" in a single file in as few lines of code as possible.

Set Up

On the command line navigate to a directory, create and activate a new Python virtual environment, and install Django via pip.

# Windows
$ python -m venv .venv
$ .venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
(.venv) $ python -m pip install django~=4.2.0

# macOS
$ python3 -m venv .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
(.venv) $ python -m pip install django~=4.2.0

Option 1: Carlton Gibson

# hello_django.py
from django.conf import settings
from django.core.handlers.wsgi import WSGIHandler
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.urls import path

settings.configure(
    ROOT_URLCONF=__name__,
)

def hello_world(request):
    return HttpResponse("Hello, Django!")

urlpatterns = [
    path("", hello_world)
]

application = WSGIHandler()

Install Gunicorn to run the local server.

(.venv) $ python -m pip install gunicorn==21.2.0

Start the server.

(.venv) $ gunicorn hello_django:application

Navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000. To stop the Gunicorn server, use Ctrl+c on the command line.

Option 2: Peter Baumgartner

Peter offered an update using execute_from_command_line to make python hello_django.py the equivalent of running Django's manage.py command. It also does not need Gunicorn to be installed.

# hello_django1.py
from django.conf import settings
from django.core.handlers.wsgi import WSGIHandler
from django.core.management import execute_from_command_line  # new
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.urls import path

settings.configure(
    ROOT_URLCONF=__name__,
    DEBUG=True,  # new
)

def hello_world(request):
    return HttpResponse("Hello, Django!")

urlpatterns = [
    path("", hello_world)
]

application = WSGIHandler()

if __name__ == "__main__":  # new
    execute_from_command_line()

Then start the server with Django's runserver command.

(env) $ python hello_django1.py runserver

And navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000.