[Django]-What are the best practices to use AngularJS with Django

There are ways of powering your client-side templates from Django templates for interesting optimizations; however, given the similarities between Django and AngularJS’s template languages, it’s almost never worth the effort here. I will pair static serving of AngularJS with the Django REST Framework for most projects of this sort.

My urls.py order of operations is almost always the Django REST Framework URLs first (written as strictly as possible), followed by a generic pattern that points everything else to my base AngularJS application template in my STATIC_ROOT dir for local testing/dev scenarios:

if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += patterns('django.contrib.staticfiles.views',
        url(r'', 'serve', {
            'document_root': settings.STATIC_ROOT, 
            'path': '/base.html'}
        ),
    )

By pointing all of the unmatched requests to the same app/template, you can start using the history-hack method of URLs and routing if you’d prefer that to hashtags. If you plan only to stick to hashtags, your final URL match could be stricter (for example matching / (URL root) with r'^$').

In production, I’ll use a reverse proxy or slow-clients HTTP server like nginx to serve the AngularJS (static) content, proxying the requests for REST services to the Django WSGI app.

For communicating with the Django REST Framework, I prefer to have class-like JS objects to marshal the data to and from the AngularJS app and the Django REST Framework. For this, I use angular-django-rest-resource to generate classes that represent the Django model classes I’m exposing in the REST Framework views.

For maximum flexibility in the queries angular-django-rest-resource can make for resources, I will have the django-filter backend installed for the REST Framework as described here. This allows the JS resources to request the Django objects constrained by parameters (e.g. /polls/?author=345&finished=1).

If you’re deploying the Django and REST operations on a separate domain of servers from whence the AngularJS main template is served (for example, if you’re using a third-party CDN on a different Internet domain for the HTML), then it’s important to allow cross-domain requests to those resources. For this, I recommend the django-cors-headers middleware.

I hope this is helpful. It’s not the best practice set, but it’s one that has worked for me.