[Django]-What is a "slug" in Django?

If I may provide some historical context :

The term “slug” has to do with casting metal—lead, in this case—out of which the press fonts were made. Every paper then had its fonts factory regularly re-melted and recast in fresh molds, since after many prints they became worn out. Apprentices like me started their career there, and went all the way to the top (not anymore).

Typographs had to compose the text of an article in a backward manner with lead characters stacked in a wise. So at printing time the letters would be straight on the paper. All typographs could read the newspaper mirrored as fast as the printed one. Therefore the slugs, (like snails) also the slow stories (the last to be fixed) were many on the bench waiting, solely identified by their fist letters, mostly the whole title generally more readable. Some “hot” news were waiting there on the bench, for possible last minute correction, (Evening paper) before last assembly and definitive printing.

Django emerged from the offices of the Lawrence journal in Kansas. Where probably some printing jargon still lingers. A-django-enthusiast-&-friendly-old-slug-boy-from-France.

The term ‘slug’ comes from the world of newspaper production.

It’s an informal name given to a story during the production process. As the story winds its path from the beat reporter (assuming these even exist any more?) through to editor through to the “printing presses”, this is the name it is referenced by, e.g., “Have you fixed those errors in the ‘kate-and-william’ story?”.

Some systems (such as Django) use the slug as part of the URL to locate the story, an example being www.mysite.com/archives/kate-and-william.

Even Stack Overflow itself does this, with the GEB-ish^(a) self-referential https://stackoverflow.com/questions/427102/what-is-a-slug-in-django/427201#427201, although you can replace the slug with blahblah and it will still find it okay.

It may even date back earlier than that, since screenplays had “slug lines” at the start of each scene, which basically sets the background for that scene (where, when, and so on). It’s very similar in that it’s a precis or preamble of what follows.

On a Linotype machine, a slug was a single line piece of metal which was created from the individual letter forms. By making a single slug for the whole line, this greatly improved on the old character-by-character compositing.

Although the following is pure conjecture, an early meaning of slug was for a counterfeit coin (which would have to be pressed somehow). I could envisage that usage being transformed to the printing term (since the slug had to be pressed using the original characters) and from there, changing from the ‘piece of metal’ definition to the ‘story summary’ definition. From there, it’s a short step from proper printing to the online world.

^(a) “Godel Escher, Bach”, by one Douglas Hofstadter, which I (at least) consider one of the great modern intellectual works. You should also check out his other work, “Metamagical Themas”.

Slug is a newspaper term. A slug is a short label for something, containing only letters, numbers, underscores or hyphens. They’re generally used in URLs. (as in Django docs)

A slug field in Django is used to store and generate valid URLs for your dynamically created web pages.

Just like the way you added this question on Stack Overflow and a dynamic page was generated and when you see in the address bar you will see your question title with "-" in place of the spaces. That’s exactly the job of a slug field.

The title entered by you was something like this -> What is a “slug” in Django?

On storing it into a slug field it becomes "what-is-a-slug-in-django" (see URL of this page)

Slug is a URL friendly short label for specific content. It only contain Letters, Numbers, Underscores or Hyphens. Slugs are commonly save with the respective content and it pass as a URL string.

Slug can create using SlugField

Ex:

class Article(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    slug = models.SlugField(max_length=100)

If you want to use title as slug, django has a simple function called slugify

from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify

class Article(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)

    def slug(self):
        return slugify(self.title)

If it needs uniqueness, add unique=True in slug field.

for instance, from the previous example:

class Article(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    slug = models.SlugField(max_length=100, unique=True)

Are you lazy to do slug process ? don’t worry, this plugin will help you.
django-autoslug

From here.

“Slug” is a newspaper term, but what
it means here is the final bit of the
URL. For example, a post with the
title, “A bit about Django” would
become, “bit-about-django”
automatically (you can, of course,
change it easily if you don’t like the
auto-generated slug).

It’s a descriptive part of the URL that is there to make it more human descriptive, but without necessarily being required by the web server – in What is a "slug" in Django? the slug is ‘in-django-what-is-a-slug’, but the slug is not used to determine the page served (on this site at least)

Also auto slug at django-admin. Added at ModelAdmin:

prepopulated_fields = {'slug': ('title', )}

As here:

class ArticleAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ('title', 'slug')
    search_fields = ('content', )

    prepopulated_fields = {'slug': ('title', )}

A slug is the part of a URL which identifies a particular page on a website in an easy to read form.

For example, /building-your-1st-django-site.

Slug only Contains:

• Letters : a-z,A-Z
• Numbers : 0-9
• Underscores : _
• Hyphens : –

slug

A short label for something, containing only letters, numbers, underscores or hyphens. They’re generally used in URLs. For example, in a typical blog entry URL:

https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2008/apr/12/spring/
the last bit (spring) is the slug.

It is a way of generating a valid URL, generally using data already obtained. For instance, using the title of an article to generate a URL.

Slug is used in Django to dynamically generate a human-friendly/readable URL. For example, the current URL of this page says:
What is a "slug" in Django?.

Notice how the URL was slugify with the actual question(what is a slug in Django)

In short slug help get rid of those ugly looking urls with valid-urls for examples in an ecommerec site instead of showing the url as www.myecom.com/product/5432156 i can show it like www.myecom.com/product/iphone11 with the help of slug

In addition to other answers, Google Search Central says for SEO as shown below:

Consider using hyphens to separate words in your URLs, as it helps
users and search engines identify concepts in the URL more easily. We
recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your
URLs.

So, you should use - to separate the words of slug as shown below:

http://example.com/blog/my-1st-blog
                      #   ↑   ↑ Use hyphens

Instead of _ as shown below:

http://example.com/blog/my_1st_blog
                      #   ↑   ↑ Don't use underscores

In addition, - is used to separate your question title What is a "slug" in Django? of slug as shown below:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/427102/what-is-a-slug-in-django
                            # Hyphens are used ↑  ↑ ↑    ↑  ↑