---
title: Getting started with Django for Rails devs - tailwind + auth
slug: getting-started-with-django-for-rails-devs-tailwind-auth
published_at: 2022-07-11 12:00:10 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:29 +0000
summary: 
description: Getting started with Django for Rails devs - tailwind + auth #rails #rubyonrails
tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, python, django, django for rails developers, django from rails, @cjav_dev, irreverentmike, django tutorial, tailwind css, learn django, django and tailwind, django tutorial python]
views: 603
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/getting-started-with-django-for-rails-devs-tailwind-auth
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNSUNGt-jnw
youtube_id: MNSUNGt-jnw
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/MNSUNGt-jnw
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MNSUNGt-jnw/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Getting started with Django for Rails devs - tailwind + auth

*Published: July 11, 2022*
*Views: 603*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNSUNGt-jnw)

[![Getting started with Django for Rails devs - tailwind + auth](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MNSUNGt-jnw/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNSUNGt-jnw)

## Description

Getting started with Django for Rails devs - tailwind + auth
#rails #rubyonrails

## Transcript

what's up welcome back in this episode we're going to look at django this is a python web framework sort of similar to rails don't worry we're going to get back to our regularly scheduled rails content any time now i've seen a ton of you kind of jumping in the comments and saying hey what uh can we see some more rails but i am excited about django and so we're gonna fire up a new django app today it's actually pretty straightforward has a lot of analogs to rails and there's a lot of sort of similarly included batteries i would say and so we're going to start from scratch and if you're uh if you have experience with python instead of ruby and you want to set up a web framework and you've never done so before i would really recommend django it's a really great web framework you could also use something like flask which is a little bit lighter weight but django um is is really really solid so what i'm going to do is first i'm going to fire up my virtual environment so i'm going to say python then and then we'll say sourcebend bin activate this will activate our environment and then i'm going to install django so this is going to install the the django package here and now we have this this new thing that we can run called django admin and django admin has a bunch of different commands one of them is start project so we're going to say django admin start project and we'll call this i don't know fun dj fun so you can't have dashes in the project name i almost always name my projects with a dash in the name but whatever so we're going to cd into dj fun and now we have uh we have our django app sort of here it's something that we can actually run with these things called manage commands so now we can say python um manage so there's this like i don't know there's this file called manage.pi we can actually take a look at this and it has like a runner that will start up the django application so if we say python manage dot pi run server this will fire up the python server running on port 8000 and now we can head over and take a look at what that looks like so similar to rails when you first fire it up it has this default landing page with links to documentation and how to build this polling app um i would say if you're just starting from scratch going through this polling app tutorial is a good idea uh it will walk you through how you handle you know models and views and how you start these things called apps so this is a really solid place to start if you want to go jump over there what i'm going to do though instead is let's work on building from scratch our django application so that it has some authentication now there's a couple of auth tools that are built into django and we're going to take advantage of those but we also need to kind of build out a lot ourselves in terms of the views for both login and we also need to build out or so we need the templates for login but we also need like our own view and template for signing up or registering for the django app so let's jump in and say let's let's make a directory called templates and inside that template or like in the templates directory we're going to create another directory called registration registration and that's where we'll put like our sign up view i guess and then a couple of files we want is something like home.html that'll be for our root route and then we'll also have like templates registration and we'll need like a login view and a sign up view and notice that these are just html views um django has its own sort of templating language uh and we're gonna use that to flesh out these views but notice that there's not like it's not like html.erb or something like that it's just you just call the file.html and then django will do its own its own template rendering inside of the project all right the next step here is that you'll notice in the project there was this um this sort of like project level or root level directory called dj fund that net that maps back to the same name as the project that we created and this is where our like root settings and our root urls are going to live so instead of this root urls this is similar to routes with rails where we can define which url patterns we want to match for which functions or which controller actions or which views we want to render it's kind of like this is where we define which paths are going to match to which thing should happen on the server and so in here for instance we want to add like path with nothing inside of it because this is where we want to render our that root sort of home.html view so we're going to say template view dot as view template and the template name is going to be home dot html and we can name our sort of routes here we'll name this one home this is similar to like the named routes that you would get with rails they work a little bit differently but there are similar sort of url helpers so from django views.generic base we need to import this template this template view class so this template view is just a a class type in django that allows us to render just a generic view and there's a couple different ways that you can extend template view so that you can have it hydrate and put data inside of your templates but for now for this root view we don't actually need anything all right so now if we were to fire this up again and just say run server we can come back over here template does not exist home.html okay so once we have that template in place inside of this directory what we need to do is go into our settings.pi and we need to tell it where our templates are so we can say like base baster templates i think something like this let's see if this works all right so this is our home view i think our home view doesn't actually have any content so let's go over to our template home and say like i don't know just drop in home we can also i'm going to open a new tab here and do our run server thing and this will auto reload most stuff just like rails so now we have home rendered out now this is just spitting back literally the string home because we don't have we don't have any html set up yet so if i refresh the page and we look at the network tab you'll notice that the response is literally the string home so that's all that we're getting back we don't have yet like an application html erb template or like kind of layout that is wrapping around our views yet but we're going to do that and we're going to do that now so one thing that i that i've been doing with a lot of projects recently is adding tailwind so inside of our django application here let's do um kind of do this step by step so we'll say setup with empty views okay let's add tailwind to our django application so we're going to say um over back over here where we have our environment set up we're going to say pip install django tailwind django tailwind is a package that has a bunch of stuff that's pretty convenient now i have learned that the order that you execute these things matters quite a bit so we're going to jump into our settings file right after we install that django tailwind package from pip then we're going to add tailwind to our installed apps now the next thing we want to do is say python manage tailwind init and this will initialize a specific app that is going to act as our theme and then we're going to sort of like rely on that themes css and settings in order to build out our base templates in our sort of like styles for the rest of the project okay so we've now initialized tailwind the next step is we want to open up our settings again and add in that theme so like okay so when that ran it created this new directory called theme now this theme is actually a type of app now the way that django works is you kind of build out these different features of your application as apps they're sort of composable and you can install some or not install some and use them by different projects in my experience in the same way in rails you might build a monolith where like all of your controllers and models and everything are in one giant project in django i've also used it the same way where you just build out a bunch of different apps and then you install all of them um i haven't used django where you have only like some apps installed so what we're going to do is every time we create a new app over here we're going to drop it into our installed apps here and that's kind of like how we will tell the root application that or the root project dj fund that we want to use this application uh theme so this is the new one that was just created when we ran tailwind init and inside of here it has a base template that has some like default some default tail and stuff so this uh this base.html in django language base.html is sort of like the layout so if you're familiar with rails they have this application html erb thing that wraps all of the content inside of um django will have this base.html all right we've got our theme installed there's another thing that's really handy and it's called um browser reload django browser reload and this does exactly what you expect um and the way that this works is we need to add a middleware so that it knows like how to trigger this django browser reload middle okay and another we need like to set a couple more variables here so we're going to say tailwind um app name is theme and i just use the defaults that it comes with we also need to set internal ips i actually don't know how this is used or why this is used 127.0.0.1 this is just like our local host i have a feeling this has to do with in development when you're running tailwind we're going to actually set up a separate process that starts watching a bunch of files and as they're changing it's going to recalculate the the classes the css classes that it needs to include in like the distribution file or something and i assume this internal ips thing is about that but i don't actually know it's just like part of the install instructions for django tailwind okay so that should get us pretty close um in order to get this browser middleware thing to work uh it needs some routes because uh it'll kind of like pull on the front end and then hit some routes on the back end so we need to go back into our urls and add a new path here that's going to be sort of like a private path reload and this is going to be something like we're going to include some urls from a package django browser reload.urls so um the way that a lot of packages or a lot of these apps work in django is that you will define some top level path that points at a set of urls and then those urls for that app will be defined in that apps your it's that inside of that app's own sort of urls um file so inside of once we go and create a new app for our for our project we will have to come back here and specify which urls uh or like kind of like what is the route for the urls the set of urls for our app and then we will uh we'll point at it so in this case this is us sort of pointing this reload path so if we go to like localhost underscore underscore reload underscore underscore that will uh contain the set of routes that are related to the django browser reload urls so if we were to come over here and say something like reload like this let's make sure it's still running um we need to add include include so we just used this new method here this is from django.urls the django.urls package so let's rerun the server and if we were to reload this page you'll see that this reload slash thing has a route that is called events so something inside of that django browser reload package is using this route in order to like tell it that it needs to reload um whatever if you also if you go to like any route and just say like blah it'll tell you like oh that's not a valid route in development at least it'll tell you and then it'll show you like here's the different routes that you can actually hit so one is just this name home we know that's the root route notice there's also this one called admin and you can actually just jump directly into an admin interface where it'll show you all of your models and you can interact with them it's almost like rails admin but comes out of the box it's pretty handy all right let's keep going so now that we have these sort of set up we want to run um python oops let's run it over here python manage tail tailwind install i know we did init and also install the install step is actually doing like sort of like an npm install for all of the npm modules that are required for tailwind to run and then we're going to say something like python manage tailwind start this starts up the process that's going to sort of watch for changes on our files and if you notice inside of our theme here there's this static source and this is where our tailwind config is so this is where we kind of like define all the different routes that we need to watch in order to see if there's any changes to those okay let's keep going so back inside of our templates directory um what i what i actually want to do is i'm going to um move this base.html into my templates my my templates root so i'm going to say move from theme templates base into my templates directory i want to just like move it up a directory so that i can have my base html or like the layout inside of that root templates directory it's just a little bit easier for me to reason about if i do it that way and then we're going to open up that base.html and we're going to edit this page also if we come back over here and no no we don't have it running anymore uh run server let's see okay all right so right now nothing um nothing or like the the base is not being used by home so what we need to do is we want to say um this is this is like the template uh the template style for django as we use the curly brace percent and we're going to say extends base.html and this should extend now the base that's kind of how we say which layout a specific view should use so inside of the home inside of the home route we're saying that it extends base.html now you'll notice that we don't see the word home anymore anymore on this page and if we look at the uh the network tab at the response that's coming back this is only showing us the content from base.html it's not showing us anything about home and that's because inside of our top level template we don't have any way to say that this that we need to sort of like yield the um the contents of any like sub view that is rendering so in rails we'd say like yield right for our application html but here instead we're going to do is say block content and then we're going to say end lock this is how we do the sort of the same thing and then back inside of home we need to wrap our home now in a block content and end block that's how we get or that's how we should get home to yield so now home is printing out there i don't like the serif font so i'm going to go back over here we're going to rip some of this out so we'll just say like django demo and then this is how our tailwind tags are loaded into the page and then it the like the package comes with some default stuff that uh i usually just uh rip out so i'm going to pull all of these out and whatever we should now have cool now we have our tailwind home thing showing up which uh which works in fact i don't actually want this to be the h1 like the content should not be the h1 it should just be like i don't know maybe inside of like a main or something maybe not even inside a main let's just put inside these these divs which we can then use as like our container so now we see home up here that's working great um and we're sort of off to the races something that okay so the next thing that we want to do is actually set up authentication so the first thing we want to do is actually like in order to set up authentication is recognize that auth sort of comes out of the box so what we could do is run this manage command so python manage create super user and there's no such table auth user so there if we want to use authentication which comes out of the box first we need to migrate the database and the way that we migrate the database in django is we say python manage make migrations and then we'll say migrate and this will run all of our migration so in rails we just say like railsdb migrate and that will run run all of our migrations that we've created in django every time we make a change to a model the way that we sort of like update the database is we change the model class itself and then we run make migrations which will detect to see if there's any changes that need to happen on the database then that will make any sets of migrations that we need and then we can run migrate and migrate is executing all of those sql commands against the database so this is going to create a whole bunch of different tables including a user table here somewhere so in one of these migrations somewhere it created a user table so now we should be able to say python manage create super user do we want to use my name sure and then the email address wave at cjav.dev and the password we'll just do password and okay super user created successfully so that's kind of how you create this root this root admin user now back inside of our application if we go to admin we can actually log in wave cdjab.dev and oh the username is not the email address it's just the username okay so this is django admin it's sort of similar to rails admin it gives you a list of all of your different models and you can just like click on a model and you can update information about that so like you can just click into username if we wanted to we could say like okay this is first name uh last name etc etc you can add them and remove them from different groups you can give different permissions um so it comes with quite a bit just like straight out of the box pretty handy now you might be wondering like okay so how do i make like a login page well there is like an uh an accounts route um that we can mount directly into our views that will use sort of the default auth urls so if we go back to our project root here and we can add a path a new route for accounts slash that will include django.contrib.off urls now now if we refresh this page now we have a bunch of different routes look at that so we have a login route a log out route password change reset all of these different routes so if we go to like accounts login you'll notice that we have just a blank page that's because it's loading that login.html page so the one that we created in the very beginning if we come into registration and say this is the login page and refresh you'll notice that shows up there so what you're noticing is that from django contrib auth urls or from the django contrib auth package it gives you routes and it gives you some views but it doesn't give you the templates for those views so in order to build out the templates we need to like write our own our own implementation of what the view should be so if we were to build our own login view we could come over here and say all right what we want to do is we want a form and the method is going to be post and we want this form to submit something um and it's gonna like pass the username and the username and password back to um back to the view so we can log the user in and we can in the case of login we can use the built-in django auth stuff to log in all right the other thing we need in django is we need to include our csrf token the same way that we included the hidden field in rails with which is the form authenticity token we might need to do something or we would need to do something like this um in django that'll drop in our csrf token or the authenticity token into the form and then there is a form that is being used to hydrate this view or this template um from the login view so again in django the terminology is a little bit different there's not like controller and then view it's not it's not the same sort of language instead we use view to mean like the python class or the python function that is going to like use your orm to collect data from the database and then figure out which template to render and then actually render the template so that's what we would call a view and django instead of calling it a controller but in um in rails we would say like oh our controller is where we're going to like use our active record models to pull things out of the database and then pick which view to render so in this case that django contrib auth the stuff that's underlying that is going to include tools for rendering a login page and one of those tools is a form so we can just say form dot as p and that should render out a form so now we see this username and password but notice that it's like not in the style of of tailwind so what we want to do is again extendsbase.html and we want to say that this is in our block content and if we wanted to we could write a custom a custom authentication base that would just be used for our login pages so now you can see it's sort of tail windy and uh we would need to sort of style this as whatever our button classes uh which we might get from something like tailwind ui or whatever so what i want to do though is just show that we can actually log in here so we can say cj villa and now we're sort of logged in but we're redirected to this slash account slash profile that is like the default but i don't want to actually go build out a profile view or anything so instead what i'm going to do is go into settings and i'm going to set a couple of different environment variables or you know app-wide variables one is login redirect url we're going to set that to the root and we're also going to set the same for logout log out redirect url is going to be the root so now if i go back to accounts login and login then i'm redirected back to home in order to add a registration flow is build out an app that we can then use to create a view for a sign up and also a template for the sign up so we're going to say python manage pi and there's a new there's another sub command here called start app this is going to create a brand new app i guess we have to give it a name accounts now i'm going to use the same exact name as we use for the path for the django contrib auth urls and the reason is that we want their urls to sort of flow and match nicely okay so now that we have this new app accounts notice that inside of accounts we have a bunch of things that it gives us by default so we just created a new accounts app that has a migrations directory that'll contain all the different migrations that we might have has this admin thing if we want to customize and register our different models for admin views now down inside of our views we want to define a new view so we're going to create a new view here called sign up view and this is going to be a class that is going to inherit from a create view so inside of django there's a bunch of different basic sort of view types there's some for all of the crud actions that you would expect create show the detail list so in this case what we want to do is we're going to create a create view so this is going to be a generic create view now this generic package is inside of one of the django tools from django.views we're going to import generic now inside of our sign up view we need to tell it what the template is that we want to render when we load up this view so the template name is going to be registration signup.html this is going to map to the same signup html that we created here let's actually just say like sign up view okay so that is going to be our sign up view we're going to come back and add a couple more things here but even though we have this view we don't have a way to actually like render the view because we don't have a path or we don't have a route in order to render this view so we need to create a url so we're going to add urls.pi here and inside of urls.pi we're going to ultimately expose this url patterns which is going to contain a list of url patterns that are again composed of these path things so in this case signup is going to create one of those sign up views we're going to call as view and the name for this view is going to be sign up and the app name is another thing we can expose from this urls this app name is helpful when we're trying to use some of the url helpers inside of the view templates so we can say something like accounts colon and this will know how to resolve like slash accounts sign up um based on sort of the name spacing so if we did not add an app name here um then we would resolve through just like the normal name of sign up but then you risk having conflicts with your other app names uh okay so we need to import some stuff um so from django dot urls import path and we also need to say something like from dot import star or import views and we can say like views dot sign up there all right the next thing we need to do is so we just created this new accounts app in order to use that accounts app remember that like every time we create a new app we have to go into settings and install that app now i'm going to do this with um accounts dot apps dot accounts config this is referencing um this class here which is gonna allow us to i don't know uh install it in a special way this was kind of like the recommended approach inside the django docks and so that's kind of the pattern that i've been following all right so now that we have that installed we also want to go back down to our root urls pattern and add another path here so what was really sort of surprising or interesting is that in in this root urls thing we can have two paths or like two patterns that are registered with the same prefix of accounts slash and as long as the names of the routes inside of those don't conflict i think we're going to be fines we're going to say accounts.urls so this accounts.urls is pointing at our accounts urls.pi and this djangocontrib auth urls is pointing at the django contrib auth packages urls that come sort of like out of the box when you uh when you install django okay so now that we have the urls installed i don't know can we can we see the signup view let's see accounts sign up okay so we're missing a query set so when we have a create view when we have a create view we need to define what the class is that is going to either we need to define the form class or we need to define like some query set that's going to be used for that form i think so here we want to say user creation um form this is part of django contrib so we want to import that from django contrib.auth.forms import user creation form another thing that we're going to need down here is some success url and this is where we're going to redirect after we successfully fill out the form so we're going to say reverse lazy login and so this is going to be from django.urls import reverse lazy this is going to be like when we're talking about reversing and then passing in a string that is similar to using like a url for or a path for um inside of rails so we might have inside of rails we would have used something like login path or something like that so this is just the way that we can like look up what is the route for you know slash account login so now we have our sign up view so that's cool so that's actually rendering now back inside of our signup template again we want to do something very similar to this so let's just copy the whole thing paste it in instead of log in we're going to do sign up sign up and i can't remember if there's anything else that we need to do yeah so that should be fine so if we refresh okay so now this is this is like the default signup form that we get or the user creation form that we get straight out of jenga so it comes with this username things where maybe we'll put in like test password and password now if we hit submit um this password is too common because i literally typed the password password so it needs to have some other stuff so password explanation exclamation one pass word exclamation one click sign up now we're signed up test and we're logged in now we're logged in i think how do we know well uh we should probably like put something on this page that tells us that we're actually logged in instead of just seeing home there so one thing that we can do is we can update that base html so let's go back to our base and add something here maybe we just add like a nav and inside of the nav we can include stuff about whether or not the user is authenticated so here inside of the view we'll have access to some user objects we can say something like if user.authenticated or is authenticated um then what we want to do is print out their user.username or something let's see if that works okay so now we see the user's username so let's i mean maybe we can just say like hello or welcome back welcome back so and so all right now we can see that welcome back in their username um we can also say something like uh else if they're not logged in maybe we want to put an a tag here that's going to the login route now we could just say something like accounts login like this again and you've seen me do this inside of rails it's a little bit lazy right and again we can do probably the same thing but log out um if they are logged in so if we click on logout we're logged out now we see this login link we click on login test put in our username and password we're logged back in now we have a logout and a login link but instead of using like hard coding this string what we want to do is we want to use a url helper and in django the way this works is we say url and then we say the the login log out this is logout um and that should give us a the same url but it's like using that reverse tooling to figure out what the the actual url should be url login all right let's see here so now if we inspect this we should see the same accounts log out and we do so now we can click on that and log in again should also have accounts login and it does okay all right so we are logged back in welcome back login test so now we have a django application we're able to register we can log in we can log out we don't have any forgot password or anything fancy like that but it does have it does have a tailwind installed so we can do some nice css the other thing i guess we want to do here is register and so here our url is actually going to be accounts sign up and so now if we're logged out we can register as a new user test to okay and test two all right so now we're logged in as test two notice though if i try to go to slash admin i'm not able to get to admin because test two is not a super user so we created that super user in the beginning um with this username and now i'm able to log in i can go see the users we have two users test and test two notice that they don't have staff status one thing we could do is just like go into the test user notice that the password too is like securely stored it's nice and whatever nice and safe we can make this user a staff user we could also make them a super user save this and now we can log out and if we log back in as test i think i may test a super user right admin now i can see admin as the test user so welcome test and they can come in here and sort of make the same changes if they wanted to all right so that gives you a sort of an idea of how you might get started with a django application in another episode we could go through how you would set up a crud application going through all of the you know the default actions for creating a database model migrating it um let me know in the comments if you're interested in seeing more django content otherwise we'll get back to our to sticking with rails stuff um i know a lot of people have been asking for more clear bnb content i have some ideas but i haven't really like jumped into recording anything um yet so we've got we've got tons of tons of stuff that we could cover let me know what you're interested in learning in the comments and thanks again so much for watching for your time and attention really appreciate it and we'll see you in the next one [Music]

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