Nice.

As a mostly-django-dev for the last 15 years, who's been exposed to FastAPI and various ORMs again recently, I should get round to write a doc about some Django bits.

Django is pretty nice, the changes between versions are small and can be managed by a human.

Part of the reason that you can have the big ecosystem is that there is a central place to register settings and INSTALLED_APPS, middleware etc.

That enables addons to bring their own templates and migrations.

There is a central place a bit further up in manage.py and that enables you to bring commandline extras to Django (and many of the things you install will have them).

Coming to a FastAPI app with alembic and finding a lot of that is build-it-yourself (and easily break it) is a bit of a shock.

The Django ORM at first can seem a little alien "why isn't this sqlalchemy" was my reaction a long time ago, but the API is actually pretty pragmatic and allows easy extension.

You can build up some pretty complex queries, and keep them optimised using the Django-Debug-Toolbar and its query viewer.

The ORM, Templates and other parts of Django pre-date many newer standards which is why they have their own versions. As a Django dev I only just discovered the rest of the world has invented testcontainers, and databases as a solution for a problem Django solved years ago with it's test database support.

I quite like the traditional setup where you have settings/common.py and then settings that extend that - e.g local.puy production.py

If you ever need a CMS in your Django project I strongly recommend Wagtail, it came after the initially most popular django-cms and learned a lot of lessons - feeling much more like a part of Django.

It has the same feeling of being productive as Django does when you first use it.

> As a Django dev I only just discovered the rest of the world has invented testcontainers, and databases as a solution for a problem Django solved years ago with its test database support.

Testing an API with model-bakery + pytest-django is absolutely joyous. As a TDD nerd, the lack of any remotely similar dev ex in FastAPI is the main reason I’ve never switched over.

As an aside, as someone who loves ergonomic testing, test containers are not the way. Dockerized services for testing are fine but their management is best done external to your test code. It is far easier to emulate prod by connecting to a general DB/service url that just happens to be running in a local container than have a special test harness that manages this internally to your test suite.

> Coming to a FastAPI app with alembic and finding a lot of that is build-it-yourself (and easily break it) is a bit of a shock.

I briefly played with FastAPI, and after the same shock I discovered Django-Ninja [1]. It's modeled after FastAPI and async-capable (if you are inclined, but warning, there be dragons). It plays nicely with all parts of Django, including the ORM.

[1] https://django-ninja.dev/

> as a solution for a problem Django solved years ago with it's test database support.

I believe it's now accurate to even say "decades ago".

>If you ever need a CMS in your Django project I strongly recommend Wagtail, it came after the initially most popular django-cms and learned a lot of lessons - feeling much more like a part of Django.

Nope. I would choose plain Django 100% of the time, especially with LLMs. Wagtail is an antipattern.