Better Onboarding

[BrandonShar]

Getting started with Inertia Django has been raised a few times as an issue for adoption and it would be great to improve that experience. We saw the same issues over in Inertia Rails and have since added generators to help with scaffolding new apps.

Are there particular Django libraries that do have better onboarding we could mimic? Maybe we could reach out to @Louxsdon to better integrate (or just link to) the great django-breeze library.

Tagging @eddyojb88 and @sopelj since they both raised this in the original thread!

[BrandonShar]

Looks like @SarthakJariwala also created a template based installer here: https://github.com/SarthakJariwala/django-vite-inertia from back in issue #3

[BrandonShar]

@mujahidfa also created an example repo here: https://github.com/mujahidfa/inertia-django-vite-vue-minimal

[eddyojb88]

@BrandonShar

Django Channels has decent documentation. I like the conciseness of the documentation for inertia so far but for me what makes a package like Channels a viable option to explore is detailed sections on:

• How it works with usage considerations
• How authentication fits in
• Security considerations
• Deployment to production - an example

The aspect that scared me off for django-inertia / django-breeze for a project that I needed to move fast on for was the production notes - I wasn't sure what the sparness of this section meant for me down the line and so I ended up going for django + htmx at the time.

E.g. in Django-breeze, production section , it wasn't clear to me as a new user why we need 2 servers for development but in production it can all be served by one server. Some notes to demystify this would be great.

The ideal from a new user perspective would be to integrate the django breeze in to django-inertia.

[SarthakJariwala]

Thanks for linking the template installer @BrandonShar - I hope it serves as a good starting point for inertia-django.
(It's not quite what rails inertia installer is but I have some ideas that I'm exploring on that front.)

To expand on @eddyojb88's point, I think it would be nice if inertia-django had a docs site similar to inertia-rails. That would provide the room for discussing different things like detailed setup instructions, authentication, deployment, etc.
The README-only documentation feels a little light from a new user's perspective. I'm happy to work on setting up docs. :-)

[eddyojb88]

I finished deploying an app today that used the builder made by @SarthakJariwala. I could see an example of a production setup (with docker) that I could adapt, which I found reassuring. I also found it had one less layer of abstraction so I could better see what was going on than django-breeze.

[navya-sammeta]

@BrandonShar
Is there a reason to use django-vite project ( README refers to it)? For production, vite can build the static assets directly into the django static directory. For Dev, we need HMR, and for that vite can do proxy mode. Only thing is, InertiaJS does need is {% block inertia %}{% endblock %} in the html page, that can be done by directly pasting into the html page or using vite-plugin-html, I don't see the need for django-vite dependency.

[BrandonShar]

Hey @navya-sammeta , no there's no specific dependency on django-vite! I just thought it was the easiest setup instructions I could find at the time.

[navya-sammeta]

@BrandonShar Thank you for your contributions. We are seeing if we can use it for a production app.

[BrandonShar]

Update: @SarthakJariwala 's awesome docs site had been merged in and I'm just fighting with DNS at the moment. I'll keep this up to date and hopefully close this issue soon!

[BrandonShar]

Good news is thanks to @SarthakJariwala and @akx our docs are live at https://inertiajs.github.io/inertia-django/ !!

Bad news is that I was unable to get the redirect setup through github because I don't own the inertiajs account itself. I'm going to chat with the current owner and see if we can get that fixed, but awesome progress nonetheless!

[willianantunes]

To help resolve the onboarding issue, I've opened a new pull request including a sample project also. 😁

#88

The sample project:

https://github.com/willianantunes/inertia-django-playground/