Perhaps you are wondering if you can combine the DRY power of a Django Web Server with the ease of development of a monorepo tool like Turborepo. You can! I’ll show you how.

Turborepo explictly has multi-language support. For this explaination, I will assume you have a working Turborepo monoreposity setup with an apps workspace. If you need help getting set up, follow the Turborepo installation guide.

Adding an app to Turborepo

Django is a long-running application, so we should create our server in the apps/ workspace. Add a directory with the name of your Django application. For this example, we’ll use apps/server/.

Inside server, add a package.json with the following contents:

{
    "name": "@repo/server",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "private": true,
    "scripts": {
        "preinstall": "python -m pip install -r requirements.txt"
        "start": "python manage.py runserver",
        "migrate": "python manage.py migrate",
        "makemigrations": "python manage.py makemigrations",
        "test": "python manage.py test",
        "lint": "flake8",
        "dev": "python manage.py runserver"
    }
}

Now we’re ready to add our Django application!

Setting up Django

If you don’t have Django installed yet, follow the Django installation guide. Verify your installation by running this command to see if Django is installed.

django-admin --version
> 4.2.3

Now, we’ll use django-admin to bootstrap the application.

django-admin startproject mysite

For a detailed guide on setting up a Django application, follow the official Django tutorial. For our purposes, the Django web server is setup.

Because Python uses its own dependancy management, I would recommend generating a requirements.txt at this point. If you’re using Python virtual environments, you can use pip freeze > requirements.txt; otherwise, I recommend using pipreqs, which generate the dependencies by analyzing the imports used within a project.

Configuring Turborepo tasks

Our goal with using a monorepo setup is to be able to execute any command from the root directory. For Turborepo to “know” about the scripts we’ve added to server, we’ll need to add them to our tasks configutation in turbo.json.

{
    "$schema": "https://turbo.build/schema.json",
    "tasks": {
        "build": {
            "dependsOn": ["^build"],
            "outputs": [".next/**", "!.next/cache/**"]
        },
        "check-types": {
            "dependsOn": ["^check-types"]
        },
        "dev": {
            "persistent": true,
            "cache": false
        },
        "migrate": {},
        "makemigrations": {},
        "lint": {}
    }
}

Try running npm run dev from the root directory.

Oops, a bug

You may be running into this issue.

pyenv: python: command not found

The `python' command exists in these Python versions:
    3.10.14

You’ll need to add a .python-version file to your root directory. Inside, put the Python version you are using.

3.10.14

Running npm run dev should now work! You should now see something along the lines of this in your console.

@repo/server:dev: cache bypass, force executing 8976b36964c53445
@repo/server:dev:
@repo/server:dev: > @repo/server@1.0.0 dev /Users/cpeterson/Documents/repos/analytics/apps/server
@repo/server:dev: > python manage.py runserver
@repo/server:dev:
@repo/server:dev: Watching for file changes with StatReloader
@repo/server:dev: Performing system checks...
@repo/server:dev:
@repo/server:dev: System check identified no issues (0 silenced).
@repo/server:dev: August 13, 2024 - 17:31:12
@repo/server:dev: Django version 4.2.3, using settings 'server.settings'
@repo/server:dev: Starting development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
@repo/server:dev: Quit the server with CONTROL-C.

This is by no means a comprehensive guide for using Django or Turborepo, but I noticed there wasn’t a tutorial out there for combining the two. Toodles!