Modern Django Starter

A CLI tool that generates Django 6.1 projects with HTMX, AlpineJS, TailwindCSS, and more — with optional Docker, PostgreSQL, DRF, Celery, Sentry, Stripe, and cloud integrations.

📚 Full documentation: mds.rianbarriga.com

Installation

Requires Python 3.12+.

# uv (recommended)
uv tool install modern-django-starter

# pip
pip install modern-django-starter

Usage

modern-django-starter create my_project

To create a project somewhere else:

modern-django-starter create my_project --output-dir /path/to/projects

Project names must be valid Python identifiers because they become the Django package name.

Without extra flags, the CLI asks for your choices interactively:

API-only projects

Pass --api-only to skip the frontend and generate a pure DRF backend:

modern-django-starter create my_api --api-only

Includes:

• Django REST Framework
• JWT auth (djangorestframework-simplejwt)
• CORS (django-cors-headers)
• API schema and docs (drf-spectacular)
• Registration/auth endpoints (dj-rest-auth, django-allauth)

Generated project

• Django 6.1
• HTMX and AlpineJS
• Django-allauth authentication
• TailwindCSS and DaisyUI styling
• Settings split into base, development, and production
• Optional: Docker, PostgreSQL, DRF, Celery, Sentry, Stripe, CI workflow, frontend pipeline

Development

Prerequisites

• Python 3.12+
• uv
• Node.js and npm (only needed if you test frontend pipeline generation)

Setup

git clone https://github.com/CasualEngineerZombie/modern-django-starter.git
cd modern-django-starter
uv sync

Checks

Run the same checks as CI:

uv run ruff check .
uv run ruff format --check .
uv run mypy
uv run pytest

CI runs lint, type checking, and tests on Python 3.12, 3.13, and 3.14.

Documentation

The docs site (mds.rianbarriga.com) is built with MkDocs Material and deployed to GitHub Pages by the docs.yml workflow on every push to main. Sources live in docs/. Preview locally with:

uv sync --group docs
uv run mkdocs serve

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. Run the checks above before submitting.

License

MIT — see the LICENSE file.