Django: what’s new in 6.0

https://adamj.eu/tech/2025/12/03/django-whats-new-6.0/

by rbanffy • 8 months ago

379 125 8 months ago

Template partials look good, which is one of the key reasons frameworks like React are as good and popular as they are, because you can reuse small segments of code.

squidsoup• 8 months ago

React allows for encapsulation of state in a reusable component, its more than just templating.

renegade-otter4• 7 months ago

React also requires you to know the long list of do's and dont's and is littered with minefields that most average developers are not even aware of.

Everyone just busts out "React" for every small thing, but few commit to actually learning this pretty complicated technology.

The last two recent Cloudflare outages were because of React.

agumonkey2• 8 months ago

indeed the vintage templating was a logical bottleneck

f311a2• 8 months ago

How is it different from include? Just less files from my perspective

simonw3• 8 months ago

They're a neat design. I started using them on my blog the other day as part of trying out Django 6: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/blob/faec3532183...

chistev2• 8 months ago

But you could already reuse templates in Django by including them. What am I missing?

teagee2• 8 months ago

Check out the HTMX example in the blog, this helped me better understand how it could be used

https://adamj.eu/tech/2025/12/03/django-whats-new-6.0/#rende...

WD-422• 8 months ago

Partialdef inline is the real win. Lets you define parts of a page without needing to place them in another file. Reduces the mental overhead of imagining how the inclusion will look because it’s already there.

The use case is mainly driven by htmx where you will have lots of these partials and the view code renders them as individual responses.

JodieBenitez4• 7 months ago

It's just syntactic sugar, making life a bit easier for HTMX users (cf. "htmx was the main motivation for this feature").

I'm using Unpoly and I just render the whole page and let Unpoly swap the content according to the target selectors, so no need for this. Not much difference in perf if you dont generate gigantic pages with heavy header/footer.

littlecranky67• 8 months ago

Key benefit for reusability and composability in React is IMHO that they don't use templates at all, but everything is a function.

globular-toast2• 7 months ago

Exactly. There are a few libraries to achieve a similar thing in Python:

* https://htpy.dev/

* https://pypi.org/project/fast_html/

* https://fastht.ml/ (different to above, I think)

* https://github.com/volfpeter/fasthx

Probably others. I strongly prefer this to templating, but I find it makes dyed in the wool Django people squirm.

wahnfrieden2• 8 months ago

There've been a variety of open source attempts at this idea. Is this official one now the best to use, or are the others still compelling?

JodieBenitez4• 7 months ago

https://django-cotton.com/ is component-based. I used it a bit, it's nice if you're used to the ways of front-end frameworks, I guess.

apothegm• 7 months ago

The most obvious value here is for HTMX, which requires a lot of partial templates.

pier25• 7 months ago

Amazing that Django didn't have this until 2025

Hamuko2• 7 months ago

Wouldn’t Jinja2 macros count?

simonw3• 7 months ago

It's had includes and custom template tags for over a decade. Partials are a slightly nicer design for a subset of that pattern.

teagee2• 8 months ago

Any code or blog written by Adam is worth spending some time on.

It will be interesting to see how the tasks framework develops and expands. I am sad to see the great Django-Q2 lumped in with the awful Celery though.

jonatron• 8 months ago

I'm of the opinion that django task apps should only support a single backend. For example, django-rq for redis only. There's too many differences in backends to make a good app that can handle multiple. That said, I've only used celery in production before, and I'm willing to change my mind.

themerone• 7 months ago

With that logic, the Django orm should only support one database.

tclancy2• 7 months ago

Why have a backend then?

hintoftime4• 8 months ago

Why is celery awful?

tclancy2• 7 months ago

Because it’s a seducer. It does what you need to do and you two are happy together. So you shower more tasks on Celery and it becomes cold and non-responsive at random times.

And debugging is a pain in the ass. Most places I’ve been that have it, I’ve tried to sell them on adding Flower to give better insight and everyone thinks that’s a very good idea but there isn’t time because we need to debug these inscrutable Celery issues.

https://flower.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

akoumjian• 7 months ago

Celery is great and awful at the same time. In particular, because it is many Python folks' first introduction to distributed task processing and all the things that can go wrong with it. Not to mention, debugging can be a nightmare. Some examples:

- your function arguments aren't serializable - your side effects (e.g. database writes) aren't idempotent - discovering what backpressure is and that you need it - losing queued tasks during deployment / non-compatible code changes

There's also some stuff particular to celery's runtime model that makes it incredibly prone to memory leaks and other fun stuff.

Honestly, it's a great education.

leobuskin2• 7 months ago

It's okay till it's not. Everyone I know who had Celery in production was looking for a substitution (custom or third-party) on a regular basis. Too many moving pieces and nuances (config × logic × backend), too many unresolved problems deep in its core (we've seen some ghosts you can't debug), too much of a codebase to understand or hack. At some point we were able to stabilize it (a bunch of magic tricks and patches) and froze every related piece; it worked well under pressure (thanks, RabbitMQ).

JimDabell• 7 months ago

The Many Problems with Celery:

— https://steve.dignam.xyz/2023/05/20/many-problems-with-celer...

The problems with (Python’s) Celery:

— https://docs.hatchet.run/blog/problems-with-celery

Dramatiq motivation:

— https://dramatiq.io/motivation.html

Here are some alternatives:

Dramatiq: https://github.com/Bogdanp/dramatiq

RQ: https://github.com/rq/rq

Huey: https://github.com/coleifer/huey

Hatchet: https://github.com/hatchet-dev/hatchet

adamchainz2• 8 months ago

OP here, thanks for the praise!

Yeah, I mentioned Celery due to its popularity, no other reason ;)

ryanisnan• 8 months ago

You are a great writer - thanks for putting this together!

gnatman• 8 months ago

Computer, load up Celery Man please.

blorenz• 7 months ago

I’m currently stuck with the tech debt of Celery myself. I understand that! Does Django Tasks support async functions?

sgt8• 7 months ago

I've been using Celery for years. What is the major issues you have with it and how does Django Q2 help?

I also use Kafka on other tech stacks but that's another level completely and use case.

boxed3• 7 months ago

I tried django-q and I thought it was pretty terrible. The worst was that I couldn't get it to stop retrying stuff that was broken. Sometimes you ship code that does something unexpected, and being able to stop something fast is critical imo.

Fundamentally I think the entire idea behind celery and django-q is mostly misguided. People normally actually need a good scheduler and a bring-your-own queue in tables that you poll. I wrote Urd to cover my use cases and it's been rock solid.

tmarice• 7 months ago

Celery is the worst background task framework, except for all the others.

There are bugs and issues, but because so many people are using it, you’re rarely the first to stumble upon a problem. We processed double-digit millions of messages daily with Celery + RabbitMQ without major obstacles. Regardless of what people say, it should be your first go-to.

rbanffy• 7 months ago

I think Celery has a lot of magic happening under it. When the abstractions are so high, it's important they never leak and you don't see anything below the turtles you are supposed to see.

I often prefer designing around explicit queues and building workers/dispatchers. One queuing system I miss is the old Google App Engine one - you set up the queue, the URL it calls with the payload (in your own app), the rate it should use, and that's it.

formerly_proven2• 7 months ago

Celery has way too much magic crammed into it, it is very annoying to debug, and produces interesting bugs. Celery is/was also a "pickle-first" API and this almost always turns out to be the wrong choice. As a rule of thumb, persisting pickles is a really bad idea. Trying to hide IPC / make-believe that it's not there tends to be a bad idea. Trying to hide interfaces between components tends to be a bad idea. Celery combines all of these bad ideas into one blob. The last time I looked the code was also a huge mess, even for old-guard-pythonic-code standards.

ChrisArchitect• 8 months ago

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46153116

jasoncartwright3• 8 months ago

[flagged]

tdfirth• 8 months ago

American hegemony, and all that.

firecall2• 8 months ago

In the US they spell it as nonze.

nine_k3• 8 months ago

Well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_word

It makes me sad when a secondary meaning, which does not even overcome the main meaning in usage, becomes an obstacle for the normal use of a word. It's like seeing a rainbow as a sexualized symbol not fit for children, because it also happens to be used by LGBTQ+ community. (BTW, since you're a Brit: did people stop using the word "fag" to refer to a cigarette?)

bigstrat2003• 8 months ago

I mean, it is sad. But unfortunately that is what happened with "master", "slave", "whitelist", and "blacklist". No reasonable person construed these as offensive or having any implications about the wider world. But there are people in our profession who are determined to take offense where none is given, and unfortunately they got their way.

jasoncartwright3• 7 months ago

Yes, words have multiple meanings - but only some words are apparently worthy of censorship - which is my point.

did people stop using the word "fag" to refer to a cigarette?

Yes, seems so. I've not heard that in at least a decade

diath• 8 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context

harshreality• 8 months ago

That didn't stop people from throwing a fit over master-slave terminology in software (having nothing to do with slavery), going so far as to rename long-standing development branch names, as well as put significant effort into removing such terms from the code itself and any documentation.

tomhow• 8 months ago

We don't need to bring this kind of thing up. We're not school children and most of us are technology professionals, so the meaning is clear.

These guidelines are relevant here:

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. ... name collisions ... . They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

viiralvx• 7 months ago

Template Partials and HTMX seems like the Django equivalent of View Components and Stimulus for Rails, which is nice.

Also, good to see first class support for Tasks, among a lot of other niceties!

sgt8• 7 months ago

If I understood correctly, to use Tasks in production right now you need to use this as well:

https://github.com/RealOrangeOne/django-tasks

Is that correct?

selcuka• 7 months ago

Correct. Django 6.0 comes with a standardised API, with 2 testing backends (ImmediateBackend and DummyBackend). You need a third-party backend to store and execute tasks.

bigthymer• 7 months ago

Rails renders partials

https://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html#pa...

mentos• 7 months ago

Given that Python tends to produce fewer hallucinations when generated by LLMs I wonder if former Django developers using AI tools are secretly having a blast right now.

tirpen• 7 months ago

I think another ace up Django's sleeve is that it has had a remarkable stable API for a long time with very few breaking changes, so almost all blogposts about Django that the LLM has gobbled up will still be mostly correct whether they are a year or a decade old.

I get remarkably good and correct LLM output for Django projects compared to what I get in project with more fast moving and frequently API breaking frameworks.

vanschelven• 7 months ago

The "one way" / "batteries included" aspect of Django may also make it easier for LLMs

boxed3• 7 months ago

If Python produces less hallucinations it's not because of the syntax, it's because there's so much training data.

Genego• 7 months ago

Whenever I saw people complain about LLMs writing code, I never really understood why they were so adamant that it just didn’t work at all for them. The moment I did try to use LLMs outside of Django, it became clear that some frameworks are just much easier to work with LLMs than others. I immediately understood their frustrations.

m_ke• 7 months ago

What a lot of people don’t know is that SWE-bench is over 50% Django code, so all of the top labs hyper optimize to perform well on it.

kristianp• 7 months ago

I know python is more prevalent in SWE-Bench than any other language, but more than 50% django sounds like a big stretch. Citation?

Edit, it's about 37%, and python-only. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.06770v3

emzo• 7 months ago

I love how Django just keeps slowly improving at every release. 6.0 is especially cool, including lots of really useful new features. Who said dependable tech was dull - this is the way is should be done. Well done all who contribute.

Induane2• 7 months ago

Same! I've been using it since pre-1.0 and love it. I am currently a few blocks away from it's birthplace.

Probably the wrong time or place but I am also on the market literally as of yesterday so if anyone is looking for an experienced Django guy, I'm your man! oldspiceap@gmail.com

renegade-otter4• 7 months ago

Dude, I used Django at 1.x - before they even had an ORM. The fact that it is adding a way to run tasks, almost a quarter of a century later, is wild to me.

I am not roasting it or anything, go Django, but just an observation.

gurraman• 7 months ago

I think it is refreshing. They don't half-ass things into the framework. They take the time to do it right. They let every feature fight for its life, and put their effort into LTS and minimizing number of issues and API changes related to the features they do deliver. As a developer I really appreciate this. I don't have to totally rewrite my entire application every new version because the implementation wasn't properly thought through.

renegade-otter4• 7 months ago

That is indeed - rare, and one of the reasons I am wary of heavy frameworks. You buy into its code AND its legacy.

xnorswap• 7 months ago

I used to have this opinion about ASP.NET then ASP.NET Core and the great churn happened. It's finally settled down again, but boy the in-between years were chaotic.

Not just the Framework -> Core migration itself, but the power to make breaking changes went to their heads, and they started quickly tearing up everything only to change their minds again, such as a short-lived "project.json" syntax.

Django is exactly the technology I'd pick if I wasn't already super familiar with the .NET stack. It's got the "batteries included" feel without the chaotic confusion of a million ways to do things. It doesn't have the breaking changes churn that happens elsewhere too.

anticodon• 7 months ago

Django had ORM from the very beginning. I've been using Django since 0.95 at it had ORM even back then. It was primitive but I hadn't to resort to raw SQL until much later.

renegade-otter4• 7 months ago

Correction - it was an "ORM". I remember now, but it was so rudimentary and useless that I never really thought of it that way.

Nothing wrong with that. One had to start somewhere.

kissgyorgy• 7 months ago

I find templates atrocious to use for component fragments like this, that's why I wrote a Python component library when I started using Django with HTMX. Order of magnitude more pleasant to use, works with _every_ Python web framework not just Django: https://compone.kissgyorgy.me/

aynyc4• 7 months ago

I've been using Django on and off at work for the past few years. I really like it. That being said, I still find its ORM difficult. I understand it now that since it's an opinionated framework, I need to follow Django way of thinking. The main issue is that at work, I have multiple databases from different business units. So I constantly have to figure out a way to deal with multiple databases and their idiosyncrasies. I ended up doing a lot of hand holding by turning off managed, inspectdb and then manually delete tables I don't want to show via website or other reasons. For green webapps we have, django is as good as it gets.

melvinroest• 7 months ago

Maybe this shows my data analyst tendencies, but why not use SQL?

aynyc4• 7 months ago

That’s what we do now. But it gets repetitive and not leveraging Django core features.

JodieBenitez4• 7 months ago

Do you use Django's multiple databases support ? (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/6.0/topics/db/multi-db/)

aynyc4• 7 months ago

Yes, we have to in order to use a lot of the features. The core issue for us is really the way Django assumes code represents database state. In normal webapp where the application has full control of the database, that's a good idea. But our databases are overloaded for simple transactions, analytics, users managements, jobs and AI. Business uses the databases in various ways such as Power BI, Aquastudio, etc.. Django app is actually a tiny part of the database. As you can imagine, we duck tape the heck out of the databases, and Django goes bonkers when things aren't matching.

sgt8• 7 months ago

Also don't underestimate setting up e.g. views or materialized views even that you can use through the ORM to query. It helps a lot and allows you to combine fine tuning SQL with ease of use through Django, and get a lot of performance out of it. Just remember to create them in the migration scripts.

aynyc4• 7 months ago

Any docs? Django migration is a HUUGE pain point for us.

luxcem• 7 months ago

I've been using Django for the last 10+ years, its ORM is good-ish. At some point there was a trend to use sqlalchemy instead but it was not worth the effort. The Manager interface is also quite confusing at first. What I find really great is the migration tool.

formerly_proven2• 7 months ago

Since Django has gained mature native migrations there is a lot less point to using SQLAlchemy in a Django project, though SQLAlchemy is undeniably the superior and far more capable ORM. That should be unsurprising though - sqlalchemy is more code than the entire django package, and sqlalchemy + alembic is roughly five times as many LOC as django.db, and both are similar "density" code.

dontlaugh• 7 months ago

I've used Aldjemy (https://github.com/aldjemy/aldjemy) on a small project and it worked pretty well for allowing me to compose the fairly complex queries needed that the Django ORM couldn't do.

BowBun2• 7 months ago

Agreed, and their DB migration workflow leaves much to be desired. By not storing a schema/DB state alongside code, Django depends on the current DB state to try and figure it out from scratch every time you run a DB command. Not to mention defining DB state from model code is inherently flawed, since models are abstractions on top of database tables. I much prefer the Rails way of composing migrations as specific DB instructions, and then getting models 'for free' on top of those tables.

jamesbfb• 7 months ago

I’m very much an Odoo guy who has dabbled with Django (and notably, celery in the past) but as someone who makes huge use of the Odoo OCA queue module[0], I never understood why Django never made use of the Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY to offload tasks. Maybe this is my misunderstanding as I’m pretty green with the Django ecosystem as a whole.

[0] https://github.com/oca/queue

manthangupta109• 7 months ago

I have been using Django on and off for the last 5-6 years, and it does have the advantage of having batteries loaded but it just feel heavy overall

Django: what’s new in 6.0

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