Robert Roskam
Engineer Manager at Pantheon
Django Channels
What is it? Why care? How to use it?
Django
Pre-Channels
Request goes in.
Src: Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Response goes out.
You can't explain it...
What is it?
Django
Post-Channels
Request goes in.
Src: Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Yeah......
What is it?
Why care?
(Maybe you shouldn't)
If you don't need async, don't use it.
Async processing is hard.
Don't overcomplicate your application if you really don't need data that realtime.
Initial builds can be done without channels, and then as you determine the UX pain points you can round out the experience with this.
Why care?
All the protocols
Channels is about protocol extensibility.
Django supports HTTP/HTTPS. Channels (originally called django-onair) was started explicitly to allow Django to use WebSockets.
Eventually Channels was redefined so that architecture could support other protocols (MQTT, XMPP,etc) and would be future proofed against additional protocols.
To the code!
How to use it?
Classic Django
Django Channels
$ django-admin runserver$ daphne -b 0.0.0.0 -p 80 testproject.asgi:channel_layer
$ python manage.py runworker
Running on the CLI
How to use it?
Django Channels: What, Why, and How
By Robert Roskam
Django Channels: What, Why, and How
A short walk-thru the architecture of django-channels
