# Django 5.2.8 documentation

# Django documentation

Everything you need to know about Django.

## First steps

Are you new to Django or to programming? This is the place to start!

- From scratch: Overview | Installation

- Tutorial: Part 1: Requests and responses | Part 2: Models and the admin site | Part 3: Views and templates | Part 4: Forms and generic views | Part 5: Testing | Part 6: Static files | Part 7: Customizing the admin site | Part 8: Adding third-party packages

- Advanced Tutorials: How to write reusable apps | Writing your first contribution to Django

## Getting help

Having trouble? We’d like to help!

- Try the FAQ – it’s got answers to many common questions.

- Looking for specific information? Try the Index, Module Index or the detailed table of contents.

- Not found anything? See FAQ: Getting Help for information on getting support and asking questions to the community.

- Report bugs with Django in our ticket tracker.

## How the documentation is organized

Django has a lot of documentation. A high-level overview of how it’s organized will help you know where to look for certain things:

- Tutorials take you by the hand through a series of steps to create a web application. Start here if you’re new to Django or web application development. Also look at the “First steps”.

- Topic guides discuss key topics and concepts at a fairly high level and provide useful background information and explanation.

- Reference guides contain technical reference for APIs and other aspects of Django’s machinery. They describe how it works and how to use it but assume that you have a basic understanding of key concepts.

- How-to guides are recipes. They guide you through the steps involved in addressing key problems and use-cases. They are more advanced than tutorials and assume some knowledge of how Django works.

## The model layer

Django provides an abstraction layer (the “models”) for structuring and manipulating the data of your web application. Learn more about it below:

- Models: Introduction to models | Field types | Indexes | Meta options | Model class

- QuerySets: Making queries | QuerySet method reference | Lookup expressions

- Model instances: Instance methods | Accessing related objects

- Migrations: Introduction to Migrations | Operations reference | SchemaEditor | Writing migrations

- Advanced: Managers | Raw SQL | Transactions | Aggregation | Search | Custom fields | Multiple databases | Custom lookups | Query Expressions | Conditional Expressions | Database Functions

- Other: Supported databases | Legacy databases | Providing initial data | Optimize database access | PostgreSQL specific features

## The view layer

Django has the concept of “views” to encapsulate the logic responsible for processing a user’s request and for returning the response. Find all you need to know about views via the links below:

- The basics: URLconfs | View functions | Shortcuts | Decorators | Asynchronous Support

- Reference: Built-in Views | Request/response objects | TemplateResponse objects

- File uploads: Overview | File objects | Storage API | Managing files | Custom storage

- Class-based views: Overview | Built-in display views | Built-in editing views | Using mixins | API reference | Flattened index

- Advanced: Generating CSV | Generating PDF

- Middleware: Overview | Built-in middleware classes

## The template layer

The template layer provides a designer-friendly syntax for rendering the information to be presented to the user. Learn how this syntax can be used by designers and how it can be extended by programmers:

- The basics: Overview

- For designers: Language overview | Built-in tags and filters | Humanization

- For programmers: Template API | Custom tags and filters | Custom template backend

## Forms

Django provides a rich framework to facilitate the creation of forms and the manipulation of form data.

- The basics: Overview | Form API | Built-in fields | Built-in widgets

- Advanced: Forms for models | Integrating media | Formsets | Customizing validation

## The development process

Learn about the various components and tools to help you in the development and testing of Django applications:

- Settings: Overview | Full list of settings

- Applications: Overview

- Exceptions: Overview

- django-admin and manage.py: Overview | Adding custom commands

- Testing: Introduction | Writing and running tests | Included testing tools | Advanced topics

- Deployment: Overview | WSGI servers | ASGI servers | Deploying static files | Tracking code errors by email | Deployment checklist

## The admin

Find all you need to know about the automated admin interface, one of Django’s most popular features:

- Admin site

- Admin actions

- Admin documentation generator

## Security

Security is a topic of paramount importance in the development of web applications and Django provides multiple protection tools and mechanisms:

- Security overview

- Disclosed security issues in Django

- Clickjacking protection

- Cross Site Request Forgery protection

- Cryptographic signing

- Security Middleware

## Internationalization and localization

Django offers a robust internationalization and localization framework to assist you in the development of applications for multiple languages and world regions:

- Overview | Internationalization | Localization | Localized web UI formatting and form input

- Time zones

## Performance and optimization

There are a variety of techniques and tools that can help get your code running more efficiently - faster, and using fewer system resources.

- Performance and optimization overview

## Geographic framework

GeoDjango intends to be a world-class geographic web framework. Its goal is to make it as easy as possible to build GIS web applications and harness the power of spatially enabled data.

## Common web application tools

Django offers multiple tools commonly needed in the development of web applications:

- Authentication: Overview | Using the authentication system | Password management | Customizing authentication | API Reference

- Caching

- Logging

- Sending emails

- Syndication feeds (RSS/Atom)

- Pagination

- Messages framework

- Serialization

- Sessions

- Sitemaps

- Static files management

- Data validation

## Other core functionalities

Learn about some other core functionalities of the Django framework:

- Conditional content processing

- Content types and generic relations

- Flatpages

- Redirects

- Signals

- System check framework

- The sites framework

- Unicode in Django

## The Django open-source project

Learn about the development process for the Django project itself and about how you can contribute:

- Community: Contributing to Django | The release process | Team organization | The Django source code repository | Security policies | Mailing lists and Forum

- Design philosophies: Overview

- Documentation: About this documentation

- Third-party distributions: Overview

- Django over time: API stability | Release notes and upgrading instructions | Deprecation Timeline