Django finally releases a new baby👶 the version 4.
Check the Updates this pretty framework comes with this time around.
About Django
Django is a high-level Python web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Built by experienced developers, it takes care of much of the hassle of web development, so you can focus on writing your app without needing to reinvent the wheel. It’s free and open source.
MVT Structure has the following three parts –
- Model: The model is going to act as the interface of your data. It is responsible for maintaining data. It is the logical data structure behind the entire application and is represented by a database (generally relational databases such as MySql, Postgres).
More about this at the Django Models
- View: The View is the user interface — what you see in your browser when you render a website. It is represented by HTML/CSS/Javascript and Jinja files.
More about this at the Django Views
- Template: A template consists of static parts of the desired HTML output as well as some special syntax describing how dynamic content will be inserted.
More About that at Django Templating
Diving into the update 😍
In December 2021, the world's most known and used web framework for the Python programming language Django had a huge update. We finally entered the era of Django 4.0 which contains various upgrades to the framework, like improved customization and the use of the template engine for forms, Formsets, and ErrorList.
However, it was announced that only Python versions 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10 will support Django v4.0. In addition, the Django v3.2.x series is the final one to support Python v3.6 and 3.7.
Major Updates
- zoneinfo default timezone implementation
The Python standard library’s zoneinfo is now the default timezone implementation in Django.
This is the next step in the migration from using pytz to using zoneinfo. Django 3.2 allowed the use of non-pytz time zones. Django 4.0 makes zoneinfo the default implementation. Support for pytz is now deprecated and will be removed in Django 5.0.
zoneinfo is part of the Python standard library from Python 3.9. The backports.zoneinfo package is automatically installed alongside Django if you are using Python 3.8.
The move to zoneinfo should be largely transparent. Selection of the current timezone, conversion of datetime instances to the current timezone in forms and templates, as well as operations on aware datetimes in UTC are unaffected.
However, if you are working with non-UTC time zones, and using the pytz normalize() and localize() APIs, possibly with the TIME_ZONE setting, you will need to audit your code since pytz and zoneinfo are not entirely equivalent.
Very important
To give time for such an audit, the transitional USE_DEPRECATED_PYTZ setting allows the continued use of pytz during the 4.x release cycle. This setting will be removed in Django 5.0.
In addition, a pytz_deprecation_shim package, created by the zoneinfo author, can be used to assist with the migration from pytz. This package provides shims to help you safely remove pytz, and has a detailed migration guide showing how to move to the new zoneinfo APIs.
Using pytz_deprecation_shim and the USE_DEPRECATED_PYTZ transitional setting is recommended if you need a gradual update path.
Functional unique constraints The new *expressions positional argument of UniqueConstraint() enables creating functional unique constraints on expressions and database functions. For example:
from django.db import models
from django.db.models import UniqueConstraint
from django.db.models.functions import Lower
class MyModel(models.Model):
first_name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
last_name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
class Meta:
constraints = [
UniqueConstraint(
Lower('first_name'),
Lower('last_name').desc(),
name='first_last_name_unique',
),
]
Functional unique constraints are added to models using the Meta.constraints option.
- Scrypt password hasher
The new scrypt password hasher is more secure and recommended over PBKDF2. However, it’s not the default as it requires OpenSSL 1.1+ and more memory.
- Redis cache backend
The new django.core.cache.backends.redis.RedisCache cache backend provides built-in support for caching with Redis. redis-py 3.0.0 or higher is required. For more details, see the documentation on caching with Redis in Django.
- Template-based form rendering
Forms, Formsets, and ErrorList are now rendered using the template engine to enhance customization. See the new render(), get_context(), and template_name for Form and formset rendering for Formset.
Conclusion
In this article, we went over some of the new features in Django v4.0, some of the third-party packages that Django v4.0 no longer supports, and the steps required to upgrade your existing version to Django v4.0.
Django v4.0’s new features are not limited to those covered in this post. For a complete list of the new features, check out Django’s official announcement. I hope you enjoyed this article.💘