Django integration

Ariadne ships with ariadne.contrib.django package that should be used as Django app and provides utilities for adding GraphQL server to Django projects.

Adding GraphQL API to Django project

Add app to INSTALLED_APPS

Add ariadne.contrib.django to your project's INSTALLED_APPS setting (usually located in settings.py):

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    "ariadne.contrib.django",
]

Ariadne app provides Django template for GraphQL Playground. Make sure that your Django project is configured to load templates from application directories. This can be done by checking if APP_DIRS option located in TEMPLATES setting is set to True:

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        ...,
        'APP_DIRS': True,
        ...
    },
]

Create executable schema

Create a Python module somewhere in your project that will define the executable schema. It may be schema module living right next to your settings and urls:

# schema.py
from ariadne import QueryType, make_executable_schema

type_defs = """
    type Query {
        hello: String!
    }
"""

query = QueryType()

@query.field("hello")
def resolve_hello(*_):
    return "Hello world!"

schema = make_executable_schema(type_defs, query)

Add a GraphQL view to your urls

Add a GraphQL view to your project's urls.py:

from ariadne.contrib.django.views import GraphQLView
from django.urls import path

from .schema import schema

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    path('graphql/', GraphQLView.as_view(schema=schema), name='graphql'),
]

Configuration options

GraphQLView.as_view() takes mostly the same options that graphql does, but with one difference:

• debug option is not available and it's set to the value of settings.DEBUG

Django GraphQL view supports extra option specific to it: playground_options, a dict of GraphQL Playground options that should be used.

Django Channels

Ariadne's ASGI application can be used together with Django Channels to implement asynchronous GraphQL API with features like subscriptions:

from ariadne.asgi import GraphQL
from channels.http import AsgiHandler
from channels.routing import URLRouter
from django.urls import path, re_path


schema = ...


application = URLRouter([
    path("graphql/", GraphQL(schema, debug=True)),
    re_path(r"", AsgiHandler),
])

At the moment Django ORM doesn't support asynchronous query execution and there is noticeable performance loss when using it for database access in asynchronous resolvers.

Use asynchronous ORM such as Gino for database queries in your resolvers.

Date and Datetime scalars

For convenience Ariadne also provides Date and DateTime scalar implementations that can be used to represent Django dates and datetimes in form understood by JS date and time handling libraries like Moment.js.

Scalars have dependency on dateutil library.

To use them in your project, update your schema to define Date and Datetime scalar and pass their Python implementations to make_executable_schema:

from ariadne.contrib.django.scalars import date_scalar, datetime_scalar

type_defs = """
    scalar Date
    scalar DateTime

    type Query {
        hello: String
    }
"""

schema = make_executable_schema(type_defs, [date_scalar, datetime_scalar, ...])