Django Channels

Channels is a project that takes Django and extends its abilities beyond HTTP - to handle WebSockets, chat protocols, IoT protocols, and more.

It does this by taking the core of Django and layering a fully asynchronous layer underneath, running Django itself in a synchronous mode but handling connections and sockets asynchronously, and giving you the choice to write in either style.

To get started understanding how Channels works, read our Introduction, which will walk through how things work. If you’re upgrading from Channels 1, take a look at What’s new in Channels 2? to get an overview of the changes; things are substantially different.

If you would like complete code examples to read alongside the documentation or experiment on, the channels-examples repository contains well-commented example Channels projects.

Warning

This is documentation for the 2.x series of Channels. If you are looking for documentation for the legacy Channels 1, you can select 1.x from the versions selector in the bottom-left corner.

Projects

Channels is comprised of several packages:

  • Channels, the Django integration layer
  • Daphne, the HTTP and Websocket termination server
  • asgiref, the base ASGI library
  • channels_redis, the Redis channel layer backend (optional)

This documentation covers the system as a whole; individual release notes and instructions can be found in the individual repositories.