django-fbv 🕶️

Utilities to make Django function-based views cleaner, more efficient, and better tasting. 💥

📖 Complete documentation: https://django-fbv.adamghill.com

Why? 🤔

The Django community has two ways to write views: class-based and function-based. One benefit of function-based views is that the HttpRequest input and the HttpResponse output is explicit, instead of being hidden within a hierarchy of classes and mixins.

django-fbv reduces the boilerplate code required when using function-based views. It also leverages locality of behavior -- the name of the template is clearly associated to the view, instead of being part of the return statement.

Instead of this:

# sample_app/views.py
from django.shortcuts import render

def regular_function_based_view(request):
  return render(request, "template_name.html", {"data": 123})

You can write this:

# sample_app/views.py
from fbv.decorators import render_html

@render_html("template_name.html")
def django_fbv_view(request):
  return {"data": 123}

If you want a more detailed critique of class-based views, I recommend reading https://spookylukey.github.io/django-views-the-right-way/.

Installation ⚙️

pip install django-fbv OR uv add django-fbv

The decorators and views can be used by just importing them. The middleware needs to be installed.

Features 🤩

Decorators

• fbv.decorators.render_html: renders a view as HTML with the specified template
• fbv.decorators.render_view: renders a view as a content type with the specified template
• fbv.decorators.render_json: renders dictionaries, Django Model, or Django QuerySet as a JSON response

Views

• fbv.views.html_view: directly render a template from urls.py
• fbv.views.redirect_view: redirect to a pattern name from urls.py
• fbv.views.file: serve a file
• fbv.views.favicon_file: serve an image file as the favicon.ico
• fbv.views.favicon_emoji: serve an emoji as the favicon.ico

Middleware

• fbv.middleware.RequestMethodMiddleware: adds a boolean property to the request for the current request's HTTP method

Prior art 🖼️

• The render_view decorator was forked from render_to in https://github.com/skorokithakis/django-annoying.
• The file, favicon_file and favicon_emoji code is from https://adamj.eu/tech/2022/01/18/how-to-add-a-favicon-to-your-django-site/.