django-tomselect 2026.5.3

Django autocomplete widgets and views using Tom Select

Django TomSelect

A powerful, lightweight Django package for dynamic select inputs with autocomplete, tagging, and more.

Django TomSelect integrates Tom Select into your Django projects, providing beautiful and intuitive select inputs with features like:

• Live Search & Autocomplete

  • Real-time filtering and highlighting as you type
  • Server-side search with customizable lookups
  • Automatic pagination for large datasets
  • Customizable minimum query length

• Rich UI Options

  • Single and multiple selection modes
  • Tabular display with custom columns
  • Bootstrap 4/5 theming support
  • Clear/remove buttons
  • Dropdown headers & footers
  • Checkbox options
  • Customizable templates

Quick Start

1. Install the package:

pip install django-tomselect

2. Update settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    "django_tomselect"
]

MIDDLEWARE = [
    ...
    "django_tomselect.middleware.TomSelectMiddleware",
    ...
]

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        "OPTIONS": {
            "context_processors": [
                ...
                "django_tomselect.context_processors.tomselect",
                ...
            ],
        },
    },
]

3. Create an autocomplete view:

from django_tomselect.autocompletes import AutocompleteModelView

class PersonAutocompleteView(AutocompleteModelView):
    model = Person
    search_lookups = ["full_name__icontains"]
    value_fields = ["id","full_name"]

4. Add URL pattern:

urlpatterns = [
    path("person-autocomplete/", PersonAutocompleteView.as_view(), name="person_autocomplete"),
]

5. Use in your forms:

from django_tomselect.forms import TomSelectModelChoiceField, TomSelectConfig

class MyForm(forms.Form):
    person = TomSelectModelChoiceField(
        config = TomSelectConfig(
            url="person_autocomplete",
            value_field="id",
            label_field="full_name",
        )
    )

6. Include in your template:

{{ form.media }}  {# Adds the required CSS/JS #}

{{ form }}

Other Features

Advanced Filtering

• Dependent/chained select fields
• Field exclusion support
• Custom search implementations
• Hooks for overriding functionality

Flexible Configuration

• Support for Tom Select Plugins
• Global settings and per-form-field configuration
• Override any template

Security

• Built-in permission handling
  • including django auth, custom auth, object perms

Internationalization

• Translation support
• Customizable messages

Example Project

To see Django TomSelect in action, check out the Example Project. It demonstrates a variety of use cases, with 15 different implementations from basic atocompletion to advanced applications, showing how to use django-tomselect's autocomplete fields in a Django project.

Each of the examples is described in the Example Project docs.

Here are a few screenshots from the example project:

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Documentation

• Complete Usage Guide
• Configuration Reference
• Example Project

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Check out our Contributor Guide to get started.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the License file for details.

Acknowledgments

This package builds on the excellent work of Philip Becker in mizdb-tomselect, with a focus on generalization, Django templates, translations, and customization.