Django Real-time Chat: WebSockets, Django Channels, and Deploying to Production

About This Tutorial

In the first half of this tutorial, you’ll learn about the fundamentals of WebSockets and you’ll build a real-time chat application using Django Channels. In the second half, you’ll learn how to deploy your app to a production environment in AWS and how to avoid common gotchas in future real-time chat apps you build.

Tutorial outline

Introduction (10 minutes)

• Introduction, outline, and goals for this tutorial.

Introduction to WebSockets (20 minutes)

• Why you should have WebSockets in your toolbox
• What are WebSockets?
• Advantages of WebSockets
• Limitations of WebSockets
• Who uses WebSockets

Intro to Django Channels (20 minutes)

What is Channels?

Writing your first consumer

Writing your second consumer

How Channels fits into your stack

Walkthrough - building a Real-time Chat application with Django Channels (45 minutes)

From our starter Python Django/React Javascript application, we’ll implement real-time chat

Getting ready to deploy with Daphne and NGINX (20 minutes)

What is daphne?

What is NGINX?

How to configure NGINX for WebSockets

Common Gotchas with NGINX for WebSockets

AWS Crash Course (15 minutes)

Building blocks of AWS: EC2, VPCs, Security Groups, and Load Balancers

Deploying Django Channels to Production (20 minutes)

How to set up AWS Infrastructure - using ElasticBeanstalk

How to set up ElastiCache (Redis) as our backend store

Common performance gotchas with deploying WebSockets

Walkthrough - let’s go to prod! (1 hour)

We’ll deploy our chat app to AWS using ElasticBeanstalk and ElastiCache

Flex Time (remainder of time left)

Additional time for questions and coding/configuring

Conclusion

Wrap up

Next step: test your channels app with async tests (resources provided)

Additional Resources

Attendee Expectation

We will be building a chat app using Python, Django, and Django Channels on the backend, and ReactJS on the frontend. We will deploy this application to an AWS Account.

The base Django and React/Webpack setup will be provided so you don’t need to be a Python/Django or React/Javascript expert, but some foundational knowledge is recommended. You will need an AWS account to deploy your app.