Django Channels Tutorial

Channels allows you to use WebSockets and other non-HTTP protocols in your Django site. For example you might want to use WebSockets to allow a page on your site to immediately receive updates from your Django server without using HTTP long-polling or other expensive techniques.

In this tutorial we will build a simple chat server, where you can join an online room, post messages to the room, and have others in the same room see those messages immediately.

1. Part 1: Basic Setup
2. Part 2: Implement a Chat Server
3. Part 3: Rewrite Chat Server as Asynchronous
4. Part 4: Automated Testing

How this copy differs from the original

This is a copy of the official Channels tutorial, changed to match the way we have worked in our fork of the MDN Django Tutorial:

• You don’t create a new project. The chat app goes into your existing locallibrary repository, next to catalog. Everywhere the original says mysite, this copy says locallibrary_config.
• Dependencies are managed with uv. pip install becomes uv add, and every command is run with uv run python ….
• Edits to existing files are additions. The original shows complete settings.py and urls.py contents because it assumes a new, empty project. Here you only add lines, so you keep what you built for catalog.
• Part 4’s tests use a separate database file. The original’s test settings would delete your development database; this copy’s don’t.
• Part 4 doesn’t need a manual chromedriver install. Selenium downloads the right driver itself.

This copy was checked on 2026-09-29 with Channels 4.3.2, Daphne 4.2.3, channels-redis 4.3.0, Selenium 4.49, Django 6.1.1, and Python 3.14.

The original tutorial is Copyright (c) Django Software Foundation and individual contributors, and is used under its BSD 3-Clause license.