Integrate with Django - websockets 10.2 documentation
Description: If you’re looking at adding real-time capabilities to a Django project with WebSocket, you have two main options. Using Django Channels, a project adding WebSocket to Django, among other features. ...

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# Integrate with Django

If you’re looking at adding real-time capabilities to a Django project with WebSocket, you have two main options.

1. Using Django Channels, a project adding WebSocket to Django, among other features. This approach is fully supported by Django. However, it requires switching to a new deployment architecture.

2. Deploying a separate WebSocket server next to your Django project. This technique is well suited when you need to add a small set of real-time features — maybe a notification service — to a HTTP application.

This guide shows how to implement the second technique with websockets. It assumes familiarity with Django.

## Authenticate connections

Since the websockets server runs outside of Django, we need to integrate it with `django.contrib.auth`.

We will generate authentication tokens in the Django project. Then we will send them to the websockets server, where they will authenticate the user.

Generating a token for the current user and making it available in the browser is up to you. You could render the token in a template or fetch it with an API call.

Refer to the topic guide on authentication for details on this design.

### Generate tokens

We want secure, short-lived tokens containing the user ID. We’ll rely on django-sesame, a small library designed exactly for this purpose.

Add django-sesame to the dependencies of your Django project, install it, and configure it in the settings of the project:

    AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = [
        "django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend",
        "sesame.backends.ModelBackend",
    ]

(If your project already uses another authentication backend than the default `"django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend"`, adjust accordingly.)

You don’t need `"sesame.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware"`. It is for authenticating users in the Django server, while we’re authenticating them in the websockets server.

We’d like our tokens to be valid for 30 seconds. We expect web pages to load and to establish the WebSocket connection within this delay. Configure django-sesame accordingly in the settings of your Django project:

    SESAME_MAX_AGE = 30

If you expect your web site to load faster for all clients, a shorter lifespan is possible. However, in the context of this document, it would make manual testing more difficult.

You could also enable single-use tokens. However, this would update the last login date of the user every time a WebSocket connection is established. This doesn’t seem like a good idea, both in terms of behavior and in terms of performance.

Now you can generate tokens in a `django-admin shell` as follows:

    >>> from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model
    >>> User = get_user_model()
    >>> user = User.objects.get(username="<your username>")
    >>> from sesame.utils import get_token
    >>> get_token(user)
    '<your token>'

Keep this console open: since tokens expire after 30 seconds, you’ll have to generate a new token every time you want to test connecting to the server.

### Validate tokens

Let’s move on to the websockets server.

Add websockets to the dependencies of your Django project and install it. Indeed, we’re going to reuse the environment of the Django project, so we can call its APIs in the websockets server.

Now here’s how to implement authentication.

    #!/usr/bin/env python

    import asyncio

    import django
    import websockets

    django.setup()

    from sesame.utils import get_user

    async def handler(websocket):
        sesame = await websocket.recv()
        user = await asyncio.to_thread(get_user, sesame)
        if user is None:
            await websocket.close(1011, "authentication failed")
            return

        await websocket.send(f"Hello {user}!")

    async def main():
        async with websockets.serve(handler, "localhost", 8888):
            await asyncio.Future()  # run forever

    if __name__ == "__main__":
        asyncio.run(main())

Let’s unpack this code.

We’re calling `django.setup()` before doing anything with Django because we’re using Django in a standalone script. This assumes that the `DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE` environment variable is set to the Python path to your settings module.

The connection handler reads the first message received from the client, which is expected to contain a django-sesame token. Then it authenticates the user with `get_user()`, the API for authentication outside views. If authentication fails, it closes the connection and exits.

When we call an API that makes a database query such as `get_user()`, we wrap the call in `to_thread()`. Indeed, the Django ORM doesn’t support asynchronous I/O. It would block the event loop if it didn’t run in a separate thread. `to_thread()` is available since Python 3.9. In earlier versions, use `run_in_executor()` instead.

Finally, we start a server with `serve()`.

We’re ready to test!

Save this code to a file called `authentication.py`, make sure the `DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE` environment variable is set properly, and start the websockets server:

    $ python authentication.py

Generate a new token — remember, they’re only valid for 30 seconds — and use it to connect to your server. Paste your token and press Enter when you get a prompt:

    $ python -m websockets ws://localhost:8888/
    Connected to ws://localhost:8888/
    > <your token>
    < Hello <your username>!
    Connection closed: 1000 (OK).

It works!

If you enter an expired or invalid token, authentication fails and the server closes the connection:

    $ python -m websockets ws://localhost:8888/
    Connected to ws://localhost:8888.
    > not a token
    Connection closed: 1011 (unexpected error) authentication failed.

You can also test from a browser by generating a new token and running the following code in the JavaScript console of the browser:

    websocket = new WebSocket("ws://localhost:8888/");
    websocket.onopen = (event) => websocket.send("<your token>");
    websocket.onmessage = (event) => console.log(event.data);

If you don’t want to import your entire Django project into the websockets server, you can build a separate Django project with `django.contrib.auth`, `django-sesame`, a suitable `User` model, and a subset of the settings of the main project.

## Stream events

We can connect and authenticate but our server doesn’t do anything useful yet!

Let’s send a message every time a user makes an action in the admin. This message will be broadcast to all users who can access the model on which the action was made. This may be used for showing notifications to other users.

Many use cases for WebSocket with Django follow a similar pattern.

### Set up event bus

We need a event bus to enable communications between Django and websockets. Both sides connect permanently to the bus. Then Django writes events and websockets reads them. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll rely on Redis Pub/Sub.

The easiest way to add Redis to a Django project is by configuring a cache backend with django-redis. This library manages connections to Redis efficiently, persisting them between requests, and provides an API to access the Redis connection directly.

Install Redis, add django-redis to the dependencies of your Django project, install it, and configure it in the settings of the project:

    CACHES = {
        "default": {
            "BACKEND": "django_redis.cache.RedisCache",
            "LOCATION": "redis://127.0.0.1:6379/1",
        },
    }

If you already have a default cache, add a new one with a different name and change `get_redis_connection("default")` in the code below to the same name.

### Publish events

Now let’s write events to the bus.

Add the following code to a module that is imported when your Django project starts. Typically, you would put it in a `signals.py` module, which you would import in the `AppConfig.ready()` method of one of your apps:

    import json

    from django.contrib.admin.models import LogEntry
    from django.db.models.signals import post_save
    from django.dispatch import receiver

    from django_redis import get_redis_connection

    @receiver(post_save, sender=LogEntry)
    def publish_event(instance, **kwargs):
        event = {
            "model": instance.content_type.name,
            "object": instance.object_repr,
            "message": instance.get_change_message(),
            "timestamp": instance.action_time.isoformat(),
            "user": str(instance.user),
            "content_type_id": instance.content_type_id,
            "object_id": instance.object_id,
        }
        connection = get_redis_connection("default")
        payload = json.dumps(event)
        connection.publish("events", payload)

This code runs every time the admin saves a `LogEntry` object to keep track of a change. It extracts interesting data, serializes it to JSON, and writes an event to Redis.

Let’s check that it works:

    $ redis-cli
    127.0.0.1:6379> SELECT 1
    OK
    127.0.0.1:6379[1]> SUBSCRIBE events
    Reading messages... (press Ctrl-C to quit)
    1) "subscribe"
    2) "events"
    3) (integer) 1

Leave this command running, start the Django development server and make changes in the admin: add, modify, or delete objects. You should see corresponding events published to the `"events"` stream.

### Broadcast events

Now let’s turn to reading events and broadcasting them to connected clients. We need to add several features:

- Keep track of connected clients so we can broadcast messages.

- Tell which content types the user has permission to view or to change.

- Connect to the message bus and read events.

- Broadcast these events to users who have corresponding permissions.

Here’s a complete implementation.

    #!/usr/bin/env python

    import asyncio
    import json

    import aioredis
    import django
    import websockets

    django.setup()

    from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType
    from sesame.utils import get_user

    CONNECTIONS = {}

    def get_content_types(user):
        """Return the set of IDs of content types visible by user."""
        # This does only three database queries because Django caches
        # all permissions on the first call to user.has_perm(...).
        return {
            ct.id
            for ct in ContentType.objects.all()
            if user.has_perm(f"{ct.app_label}.view_{ct.model}")
            or user.has_perm(f"{ct.app_label}.change_{ct.model}")
        }

    async def handler(websocket):
        """Authenticate user and register connection in CONNECTIONS."""
        sesame = await websocket.recv()
        user = await asyncio.to_thread(get_user, sesame)
        if user is None:
            await websocket.close(1011, "authentication failed")
            return

        ct_ids = await asyncio.to_thread(get_content_types, user)
        CONNECTIONS[websocket] = {"content_type_ids": ct_ids}
        try:
            await websocket.wait_closed()
        finally:
            del CONNECTIONS[websocket]

    async def process_events():
        """Listen to events in Redis and process them."""
        redis = aioredis.from_url("redis://127.0.0.1:6379/1")
        pubsub = redis.pubsub()
        await pubsub.subscribe("events")
        async for message in pubsub.listen():
            if message["type"] != "message":
                continue
            payload = message["data"].decode()
            # Broadcast event to all users who have permissions to see it.
            event = json.loads(payload)
            recipients = (
                websocket
                for websocket, connection in CONNECTIONS.items()
                if event["content_type_id"] in connection["content_type_ids"]
            )
            websockets.broadcast(recipients, payload)

    async def main():
        async with websockets.serve(handler, "localhost", 8888):
            await process_events()  # runs forever

    if __name__ == "__main__":
        asyncio.run(main())

Since the `get_content_types()` function makes a database query, it is wrapped inside `asyncio.to_thread()`. It runs once when each WebSocket connection is open; then its result is cached for the lifetime of the connection. Indeed, running it for each message would trigger database queries for all connected users at the same time, which would hurt the database.

The connection handler merely registers the connection in a global variable, associated to the list of content types for which events should be sent to that connection, and waits until the client disconnects.

The `process_events()` function reads events from Redis and broadcasts them to all connections that should receive them. We don’t care much if a sending a notification fails — this happens when a connection drops between the moment we iterate on connections and the moment the corresponding message is sent — so we start a task with for each message and forget about it. Also, this means we’re immediately ready to process the next event, even if it takes time to send a message to a slow client.

Since Redis can publish a message to multiple subscribers, multiple instances of this server can safely run in parallel.

## Does it scale?

In theory, given enough servers, this design can scale to a hundred million clients, since Redis can handle ten thousand servers and each server can handle ten thousand clients. In practice, you would need a more scalable message bus before reaching that scale, due to the volume of messages.