Part 1 - Setup Project

In this tutorial we will build a simple chat server. It will consist of two pages:

• The room list - consisting of the list of all available chat rooms.

• The chat room - where anyone can go and post a message.

This tutorial assumes basic knowledge of the Django framework and will use class-based generic views to minimize the amount of code and to focus more on Hotwire.

Create a virtual environment using a tool of your choice and install turbo-django, along with django, and channels.

$ pip install django turbo-django channels

Start a django project and create an app called chat

$ django-admin startproject turbotutorial
$ cd turbotutorial/
$ ./manage.py startapp chat

You should now have a set of directories that looks something like:

turbotutorial/
    chat/
        migrations/
        admin.py
        apps.py
        models.py
        tests.py
        views.py
    turbotutorial/
        asgi.py
        settings.py
        urls.py
        wsgi.py

Open turbotutorial/settings.py.

• Add turbo, channels, and chat to INSTALLED_APPS.

• Change WSGI_APPLICATION = 'turbotutorial.wsgi.application' to ASGI_APPLICATION = 'turbotutorial.asgi.application'

Your settings.py file should now look like this.

ASGI_APPLICATION = 'turbotutorial.asgi.application'


INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'turbo',
    'channels',
    'chat'
]

CHANNEL_LAYERS = {
    "default": {
        # Don't use this backend in production
        # See https://channels.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/channel_layers.html
        "BACKEND": "channels.layers.InMemoryChannelLayer"
    }
}

You should now be able to run python manage.py runserver, visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/ and see the standard django startup screen greeting: The install worked successfully! Congratulations!. If so, we’re ready to start coding.