Show HN: Library to handle front end state in back end for Django
GitHub - jonathan-s/django-sockpuppet: Build reactive applications with the django tooling you already know and love.
Welcome to Sockpuppet 👋
  
    
    
    
      
    
    
      
    
    
      
    
    
    
      
    
    
  

🎉 You just discovered an exciting new way to build modern, reactive, real-time apps with Django.
Why should I spend time exploring this? If you use current frontend libraries, such as react, vue or angular you end up creating state for the frontend and then updating state changes in the backend through an api.
This means that you forgo server-rendered html with the advantages that brings + you'll end up with a more complex app overall.
With this library you can still use normal django templates, and any frontend state you change will be directly reflected in the backend. Currently this happens through the use of websockets.
This is the django implementation of the excellent rails library stimulus-reflex, which in turn is inspired by Phoenix LiveView.
Hit me up on twitter if you have any questions.  
📚 Documentation

Official Documentation

⚡️ Get started
pip install django-sockpuppet

# If performance is important you can take advantage lxml parsing
# It will typically speed up the round trip by 30-90ms depending on the html
pip install django-sockpuppet[lxml]

# Add these into INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'channels',
    'sockpuppet'
]

# generates scaffolding for webpack.config.js and installs required js dependencies
# if you prefer to do that manually read the more thorough documentation
python manage.py initial_sockpuppet

# scaffolds a new reflex with everything that's needed.
python manage.py generate_reflex app_name name_of_reflex
You're almost there, read about how to tie it all together in the quickstart documentation
💙 Community

Discord - We share the discord together with stimulus-reflex, and there is a channel dedicated for python/django discussions.
django-sockpuppet-expo - Do you want more examples? There code examples of chats, book search, etc ... We accept PRs :)

🛠 Development in the repo
See some common commands that can be useful for development
pip install -r requirements_dev.txt
invoke -l
Try out a minimal example manually
git clone git@github.com:jonathan-s/django-sockpuppet.git
npm install
npm run build:test
python manage.py runserver
# visit https://localhost:8000/test

⛑ Running tests locally
The most important tests are integration tests that makes sure that frontend and backend work together in conjunction with each other.
# Install the cypress et al
npm install

# Spin up a dev server that uses some fixtures
inv test-server

# Run the cypress tests
npm run cypress:run

🔜 Release
pip install -r requirements_dev.txt
invoke release -b feature

