Async Django

The steadily added async support to different layers of the Django stack over the past few releases has been inspiring to watch. With Django 4.1, async support was added to the ORM and with 4.2 async support was added to Django Models. Both additions are particularly useful with django-ninja which melds a FastAPI-like API development experience with the rock-solid benefits of Django.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/latest/topics/async/ has the latest state of asynchronous support in Django.

https://fly.io/django-beats/running-tasks-concurrently-in-django-asynchronous-views/ has a good overview of the history and how to use an async view to call two methods at once.

However, there are still a few sticking gotchas when writing async views with Django.

Async views calling async functions

Let's say you have a Book model with an async model method.

import httpx

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=255)

    async def get_(self):
        httpx.get("https://some-book-title-lookup.com")

from typing import Awaitable, Callable

from asgiref.sync import async_to_sync
from django import template

register = template.Library()


@register.filter
def syncify(fn):
    @async_to_sync()
    def _syncify(fn: Awaitable) -> Callable:
        return fn

    return _syncify(fn)

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Hi, I'm Adam 👋

I've been a backend programmer for ~20 years in a variety of different languages before I discovered Python 10 years ago and never looked back. alldjango includes all the hard-won experience I've gained over the years building production-scale Django websites.

Feel free to reach out to me on Mastodon or make a GitHub Issue with questions, comments, or bitter invectives.

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