Forge

Quickly build a professional web app using Django.

Forge is a set of opinions. It guides how you work, chooses what tools you use, and makes decisions so you don't have to.

At it's core, Forge is Django. But we've taken a number of steps to make it even easier to build and deploy a production-ready app on day one.

If you're an experienced Django user, you'll understand and (hopefully) agree with some of Forge's opinions. If you're new to Django or building web applications, we've simply removed questions that you might not even be aware of.

Forge will get you from zero to one on a revenue-generating SaaS, internal business application, or hobby project.

Quickstart

Start a new project in 5 minutes:

curl -sSL https://djangoforge.dev/quickstart.py | python3 - my-project

What's included

Things that come with Forge, that you won't get from Django itself:

• Configure settings with environment variables
• A much simpler settings.py
• Extraneous files (manage.py, wsgi.py, asgi.py) have been removed unless you need to customize them
• Start with a custom user model (users.User)
• Start with a "team" model (teams.Team)
• Send emails using Django templates (ex. templates/email/welcome.html)
• A starter forge_base.html
• Default form rendering with Tailwind classes
• Login in with email address (in addition to usernames)
• Abstract models for common uses (UUIDs, created_at, updated_at, etc.)
• Test using pytest and pytest-django
• Static files served with WhiteNoise

We're also able to make some decisions about what tools you use with Django -- things that Django (rightfully) doesn't take a stance on:

• Deploy using Heroku
• Manage Python dependencies using Poetry
• Style using Tailwind CSS
• Format your code using black and isort

Lastly, we bring it all together with a forge CLI:

Local development

• forge work - your local development command (runs runserver, Postgres, and Tailwind at the same time)
• forge test - run tests using pytest
• forge format - format app code with black and isort
• forge pre-commit - checks tests and formatting before commits (installed as a git hook automatically)
• forge django - passes commands to Django manage.py (i.e. forge django makemigrations)

Deployment

• forge pre-deploy - runs Django system checks before deployment starts
• forge serve - a production gunicorn process

Misc.

• forge init - used by the quickstart to create a new project, but can be used by itself too

Inspired by

• create-react-app
• Bullet Train
• SaaS Pegasus
• Laravel Spark