What it does
Django is a Python framework for building web applications. A project contains settings for an application, while individual Django apps organize features such as polls or accounts. The official tutorial builds a public voting site alongside an admin area for managing its data, giving developers a concrete path from project setup to views and URLs without first choosing a hosted platform.
Django's first tutorial is a useful guide for people who want to understand how a full web application is organized. It walks through a poll site with two surfaces: a public page where visitors view and vote in polls, and an admin site where staff can add, change, and delete poll data. The distinction between a project, which holds settings, and an app, which groups a feature, becomes clearer as the tutorial creates its first polls package.
The documented starting flow is local: install Python and Django, run django-admin startproject to create the project, then use python manage.py startapp polls for the feature package. The tutorial next adds a view and URL route and uses Django's development server to inspect the page. These commands are examples from the guide, not commands run for this listing. Python's included SQLite database is enough for the tutorial, so a new reader can learn the framework before arranging a separate database service.
Django is a broad framework rather than a narrow API library. Its project settings and app structure help when a site needs a database-backed model, views, routes, and administrative workflows together. Teams should still consult the version-matched deployment guide before exposing a local development setup to production. The official source repository publishes Django under the BSD 3-Clause license. Django and FastAPI are both Python projects, but Django's tutorial teaches a full application while FastAPI focuses on HTTP API endpoints.
Strengths
- The official tutorial ties a public site and an admin workflow to the same example application.
- The project and app structure gives larger sites a convention for separating settings from feature code.
- A reader can follow the initial tutorial using Python's included SQLite database before setting up another database.
Watch out for
- The framework's project structure and production deployment choices are broader than needed for a small isolated endpoint.
Best for
- Python teams building database-backed websites with views, routes, and administrative workflows.
- Developers who want a guided path from a project skeleton to a working application feature.
- Applications that benefit from separating project configuration from feature-specific Django apps.
Sources
- Django (Oct 25, 2026)
- Writing your first Django app, part 1 (Oct 25, 2026)
- Quick install guide (Oct 25, 2026)
- django/django (Oct 25, 2026)
- Django license (Oct 25, 2026)