As a Django backend developer you might need to collaborate with a frontend dev who uses react or you might be a full stack developer interested in building the front end of your applications with react( which I believe we all love by the way 😌). Then you need to learn how to interface a react frontend application to your Django backend. This tutorial will guide you through the easy steps. We are going to set up the Django backend first then we'll set up our react frontend and then connect them together.

Setting up the Django backend.

I’ll assume that you already have python installed on your machine. If you don't, you can download and set it up via this link. Please ensure you download the latest version of python. (Python 3.97)

Open the Command Line on Windows, Terminal on Mac and Linux and navigate to the directory where you want to store the project and create a new directory

Move into the new directory

Create a Virtual environment.

It is recommended to always create a virtual environment before you start your project. This helps you to separate the packages you use in this application from other applications; any change you make here wont affect the same package in another application on your system. To create a Virtual environment on your system; run this command:

After creating the environment, activate it by running :

You can deactivate it by simply running the command below, but you don't have to deactivate it yet.

Installing Django

Now let us proceed to installing Django,

Create a new django project and name it “project1”

Move into the project directory

Migrate your “changes” with this command

Then you can start your server to ensure that everything is working properly

Copy this url: http://127.0.0.1:8000 and open in any browser of your choice. You should be able to see something similar to this 👇

Setting up the react frontend.

Next create the frontend react application by running

Move into the frontend directory

and then start the frontend application by running

You should see the default react application page in your browser now; if you cannot see it open this link in your browser.

We wont be making changes to the installed react application so we are done here but we need to build the package which the backend will make use of by running:

Now let's head to the backend setup and connect it to the react application we just created.

#Interfacing the front end application to the Django backend.

Move back into the root folder

Next we'll be making some changes to the settings.py file in the backend project file so that the django backend can recognize the react application we created as the default frontend directory. Open up the settings.py file and make the following changes.

Import 'os' at the top of the file

then configure the template directory by pointing it towards the build folder in our frontend react directory.

We need to configure the static files directory as well; add this line to the bottom of the page below the STATIC_URL line.

We are done with the setup. So let us go ahead and create a simple view that will display our default react page.

Dont forget to add the new app "core" to the "INSTALLED APPS" section in your settings.py file.

Open the views.py file and create a simple function based view that just renders our page.

Then we map the created view to a url in our urls.py file in the project1 folder. We import the "front" view function from the core app and we map it to the default url " ".

The work is done. Now run

Reload the page in your browser and you should now see the react page we saw earlier.

Notice that the url is now http://127.0.0.1:8000.

We have successfully connected our Django backend to a react frontend. You will definitely need Django rest framework to create the api's the react frontend application will make use of to get backend data. Now you can get started on that great project idea of yours!! Cheers!!