Angular and Django Integration in One Project

For those times, when you ought to do things which you don’t want to do.

Requirements: Django > 1.8, Angular 8, 9 or above. I’ve done this Angular 9.

Let’s jump directly into a pool, I’m guessing, you already have a basic Django setup, which is:

- Vritualenv setup
- Django project
- Static files and template files setup

Start by installing angular cli into your local.

npm install -g @angular/cli

If you are on windows’, please set the path of the ng command. Otherwise, you can use

npm run ng <your ng command>

for the rest of the article.

In Django, create a Landing view and URL pointing to that view. And render a template which you’re going to use for Angular. Let’s say
```
angular_index.html
```
which is residing into Django templates dir.
Now, from command-line, create a new angular project into a Django static directory.
```
ng new frontend
```
.
Now your Angular apps` basic structure is done, for testing, run
```
ng build
```
. This will compile your code and produce some files into
```
dist
```
directory which will be created into a
```
frontend
```
(your angular app) directory.Now go into
```
angular_index.html
```
and include these compiled files
```
runtime-es2015.js
```
,
```
polyfills.js
```
,
```
styles-es2015.js
```
,
```
vendor-es2015.js
```
,
```
main-es2015.js
```
into Django template JS block.

<script type="type/javascript" src="{% static 'frontend/dist/runtime-es2015.js' %}"></script>
<script type="type/javascript" src="{% static 'frontend/dist/polyfills-es2015.js' %}"></script>
<script type="type/javascript" src="{% static 'frontend/dist/styles-es2015.js' %}"></script>
<script type="type/javascript" src="{% static 'frontend/dist/vendor-es2015.js' %}"></script>
<script type="type/javascript" src="{% static 'frontend/dist/main-es2015.js' %}"></script>

And now you’re almost done, just add

<body>
    <app-root></app-root>

    <!-- your script files here in JS block -->
</body>

into

angular_index.html

and run your python server by

python manage.py runserver

. Goto your defined URL for your angular app and you’ll be seeing the app.

Up until now, everything is working fine, but the problem is, every time you do some code change, you have run

ng build

to compile the angular code and then see the changes reflect in the browser.

So you might be thinking, why not use

ng serve

, yes

ng serve

is a great option. But the sad part is, it does not provide us with the compiled files. it saves those files in the memory. So we need to use watch option in

ng build

for development purpose.

Run

ng build --watch

into a terminal and it will run hot reload your project with every file change. But now, your browser will not show anything. Because at watch state,

ng build --watch

produces different filenames without postfix of es2015 . So you need to change those files names in the

angular_index.html

and include the following files.

<script type="type/javascript" src="{% static 'frontend/dist/runtime.js' %}"></script>
<script type="type/javascript" src="{% static 'frontend/dist/polyfills.js' %}"></script>
<script type="type/javascript" src="{% static 'frontend/dist/styles.js' %}"></script>
<script type="type/javascript" src="{% static 'frontend/dist/vendor.js' %}"></script>
<script type="type/javascript" src="{% static 'frontend/dist/main.js' %}"></script>

For better configuration, you can get the environment from

settings.py

and with the help of

if

condition, you can set the files according to the environment.

Just in case, if you add support for IE, there will extra file which will generate. You need to add that file to render everything perfectly.

🙏 — Abhishek Kumar Singh

Previously published at https://medium.com/@abheist/angular-and-django-integration-into-one-project-46dcfe240f60