interview, here are the top 50 commonly asked Django Interview

Questions and Answers.

Top 10 Django Interview Questions:

Q1. What is the difference between Flask and Django?

Q2. What is Django?

Q3. Do you know any companies that use Django?

Q4. What are the features of Django?

Q5. How do you check for the version of Django installed on your

system?

Q6. What are the advantages of using Django?

Q7. Explain Django’s architecture.

Q8. Give a brief about the Django admin.

Q9. How do you connect your Django Project to the database?

Q10. What are the various files that are created when you create a

Django Project? Explain briefly.

Lets us take a look at our first question in this Django Interview

Questions and Answers article.

Q1. What is the difference between Flask and

Django?
Comparison Factor Django Flask
Supports large
Project Type Built for smaller projects
projects
Templates, Admin
Built-in Requires installation
and ORM
Requires more
Ease of Learning learning and Easy to learn
practice
Allows complete web More flexible as the user
development without can select any third-party
Flexibility
the need for third- tools according to their
party tools choice and requirements
Does not support
Visual Debugging Supports Visual Debug
Visual Debug
Type of framework Batteries included Simple, lightweight
Bootstrapping-tool Built-it Not available
Q2. What is Django?
Django is a web development framework that was developed in a

fast-paced newsroom. It is a free and open-source framework that

was  named after Django Reinhardt who was a jazz guitarist from

the 1930s. Django is maintained by a non-profit organization

called the Django Software Foundation. The main goal of Django is

to enable Web Development quickly and with ease.

Q3. Name some companies that make use of

Django?
Some of the companies that make use of Django are Instagram,

DISCUS, Mozilla Firefox, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit, etc.

Q4. What are the features of Django?  

• SEO Optimized
• Extremely fast
• Fully loaded framework that comes along with authentications,
content administrations, RSS feeds, etc
• Very secure thereby helping developers avoid common security
mistakes such as cross-site request forgery (csrf),
clickjacking, cross-site scripting, etc
• It is exceptionally scalable which in turn helps meet the
heaviest traffic demands
• Immensely versatile which allows you to develop any kind of
websites

Q5. How do you check for the version of

Django installed on your system?
To check for the version of Django installed on your system, you

can open the command prompt and enter the following command:

• python -m django –version

You can also try to import Django and use the get_version() method

as follows:
import django
print(django.get_version())

Q6. What are the advantages of using Django?

• Django’s stack is loosely coupled with tight cohesion
• The Django apps make use of very less code
• Allows quick development of websites
• Follows the DRY or the Don’t Repeat Yourself Principle which
means, one concept or a piece of data should live in just one
place
• Consistent at low as well as high levels
• Behaviors are not implicitly assumed, they are rather
explicitly specified
• SQL statements are not executed too many times and are
optimized internally
• Can easily drop into raw SQL whenever required
• Flexibility while using URL’s

Q7. Explain Django architecture.

Django follows the MVT or Model View Template architecture whcih

is based on the MVC or Model View Controller architecture. The

main difference between these two is that Django itself takes care

of the controller part.

According to Django, the ‘view’ basically describes the data

presented to the user. It does not deal with how the

data  looks but rather what the data actually is. Views are

basically callback functions for the specified URL’s and these

callback functions describe which data is presented.

The ‘templates’ on the other hand deal with the presentation of

data, thereby, separating the content from its presentation. In

Django, views delegate to the templates to present the data.

The ‘controller’ here is Django itself which sends the request to

the appropriate view in accordance with the specified URL. This is

why Django is referred to as MTV rather than MVC architecture.

Q8. Give a brief about ‘django-admin’.

django-admin is the command-line utility of Django for

administrative tasks. Using the django-admin you can perform a

number of tasks some of which are listed out in the following

table:

Task Command
To display the usage information and the list
django-admin help
of the commands provided by each application
django-admin help –
To display the list of available commands
command
To display the description of a given command django-admin help

and the list of its available options <command>

Determining the version of Django django-admin version
Creating new migrations based on the changes django-admin

made in models makemigrations

Synchronizing the database state with the
django-admin migrate
current set of models and migrations
django-admin
Starting the development server
runserver
Sending a test email in order to confirm the django-admin

email sending through Django is working sendtestemail

To start the Python interactive interpreter django-admin shell
django-admin
To show all the migrations in your project
showmigrations

Q9. How do you connect your Django project

to the database?
Django comes with a default database which is SQLite. To connect

your project to this database, use the following commands:

1.python manage.py migrate (migrate command looks at the

INSTALLED_APPS settings and creates database tables
accordingly)
2.python manage.py makemigrations (tells Django you have
created/ changed your models)
3.python manage.py sqlmigrate <name of the app followed by the
generated id> (sqlmigrate takes the migration names and
returns their SQL)
Q10. What are the various files that are
created when you create a Django Project?
Explain briefly.
When you create a project using the startproject command, the

following files will be created:

File Name Description

A command-line utility that allows you to interact
manage.py
with your Django project
An empty file that tells Python that the current
__init__.py
directory should be considered as a Python package
settings.py Consists of the settings for the current project
urls.py Contains the URL’s for the current project
This is an entry-point for the web servers to serve
wsgi.py
the project you have created

Django Interview Questions

Q11. What are ‘Models’?
Models are a single and definitive source for information about

your data. It consists of all the essential fields and behaviors

of the data you have stored. Often, each model will map to a

single specific database table.

In Django, models serve as the abstraction layer that is used for

structuring and manipulating your data. Django models are a

subclass of the django.db.models.Model class and the attributes in

the models represent database fields.

Q12. What are ‘views’?

Django views serve the purpose of encapsulation. They encapsulate

the logic liable for processing a user’s request and for returning

the response back to the user. Views in Django either return an

HttpResponse or raise an exception such as Http404. HttpResponse

contains the objects that consist of the content that is to be

rendered to the user. Views can also be used to perform tasks such

as read records from the database, delegate to the templates,

generate a PDF file, etc.

Q13. What are ‘templates’?

Django’s template layer renders the information to be presented to

the user in a designer-friendly format. Using templates, you can

generate HTML dynamically. The HTML consists of both static as

well as dynamic parts of the content. You can have any number of

templates depending on the requirement of your project. It is also

fine to have none of them.

Django has its own template system called the Django template

language (DTL). Regardless of the backend, you can also load and

render templates using Django’s standard admin.

Q14. What is the difference between a

Project and an App?
An app is basically a Web Application that is created to do

something for example, a database of employee records. A project,

on the other hand, is a collection of apps of some particular

website. Therefore, a single project can consist of ‘n’ number of

apps and a single app can be in multiple projects.

Q15. What are the different inheritance

styles in Django?
Django has three possible inheritance styles:

Inheritance
Description
style
Abstract base Used when you want to use the parent class to hold
 information that you don’t want to type for each

classes child model. Here, the parent class is never used

in solitude
Used when you have to subclass an existing model
Multi-table
and want each
inheritance
model to have its own database table
Used if you only want to modify the Python-level

Proxy models behavior of a model, without changing the ‘models’

fields in any way

Q16. What are static files?

Static files in Django are those files that serve the purpose of

additional files such as the CSS, images or JavaScript files.

These files are managed by django.contrib.staticfiles. These files

are created within the project app directory by creating a

subdirectory named as static.

Q17. What are ‘signals’?

Django consists of a signal dispatcher that helps allow decoupled

applications to get notified when actions occur elsewhere in the

framework. Django provides a set of built-in signals that

basically allow senders to notify a set of receivers when some

action is executed. Some of the signals are as follows:

Signal Description
django.db.models.signals.pre_sav

e Sent before or after a model’s

django.db.models.signals.post_sa save() method is called

ve
django.db.models.signals.pre_del Sent before or after a model’s

ete delete() method or queryset’s

django.db.models.signals.post_de delete() method is called

 lete
django.db.models.signals.m2m_cha Sent when Django starts or

nged finishes an HTTP request

Q18. Briefly explain Django Field Class.

‘Field’ is basically an abstract class that actually represents a

column in the database table. The Field class, is in turn, a

subclass of  RegisterLookupMixin. In Django, these fields are used

to create database tables (db_type()) which are used to map Python

types to the database using get_prep_value() and vice versa

using from_db_value()  method. Therefore, fields are fundamental

pieces in different Django APIs such as models and querysets.

Q19. How to do you create a Django project?

To create a Django project, cd into the directory where you would

like to create your project and type the following command:

• django-admin startproject xyz

NOTE: Here, xyz is the name of the project. You can give any name

that you desire.

Django Interview Questions

Q20. What is mixin?
Mixin is a type of multiple inheritance wherein you can combine

behaviors and attributes of more than one parent class. Mixins

provide an excellent way to reuse code from multiple classes. For

example, generic class-based views consist of a mixin called

TemplateResponseMixin whose purpose is to

define render_to_response() method. When this is combined with a

class present in the View, the result will be a TemplateView

class.
One drawback of using these mixins is that it becomes difficult to

analyze what a child class is doing and which methods to override

in case of its code being too scattered between multiple classes.

Q21. What are ‘sessions’?

Sessions are fully supported in Django. Using the session

framework, you can easily store and retrieve arbitrary data based

on the per-site-visitors. This framework basically stores data on

the server-side and takes care of sending and receiving cookies.

These cookies consist of a session ID but not the actual data

itself unless you explicitly use a cookie-based backend.

Q22. What do you mean by context?

Context in Django is a dictionary mapping template variable name

given to Python objects. This is the conventional name, but you

can give any other name of your choice if you wish to do it.

Q23. When can you use iterators in Django

ORM?
Iterators in Python are basically containers that consist of a
countable number of elements. Any object that is an iterator

implements two methods which are, the __init__() and the

__next__()  methods. When you are making use of iterators in

Django, the best situation to do it is when you have to process

results that will require a large amount of memory space. To do

this, you can make use of the iterator() method which basically

evaluates a QuerySet and returns the corresponding iterator over

the results.
Q24. Explain the caching strategies of
Django?
Caching basically means to save the output of an expensive

calculation in order to avoid performing the same calculation

again. Django provides a robust cache system which in turn helps

you save dynamic web pages so that they don’t have to be evaluated

over and over again for each request. Some of the caching

strategies of Django are listed down in the following table:

Strategy Description
Memory-based cache server which is the fastest and
Memcached
most efficient
Filesystem Cache values are stored as separate files in a

caching serialized order

This is actually the default cache in case you have
Local-memory
not specified any other. This type of cache is per-
caching
process and thread-safe as well
Database Cache data will be stored in the database and works

caching very well if you have a fast and well-indexed

database server

Q25. Explain the use of Middlewares in

Django.
You may come across numerous Django Interview Questions, where you

will find this question. Middleware is a framework that is light

and low-level plugin system for altering Django’s input and output

globally. It is basically a framework of hooks into the request/

response processing of Django. Each component in middleware has

some particular task. For example, the AuthenticationMiddleware is

used to associate users with requests using sessions. Django

provides many other middlewares such as cache middleware to enable

site-wide cache, common middleware that performs many tasks such

as forbidding access to user agents, URL rewriting, etc, GZip

middleware which is used to compress the content for browsers,

etc.

Q26. What is the significance of manage.py

file in Django?
The manage.py file is automatically generated whenever you create

a project. This is basically a command-line utility that helps you

to interact with your Django project in various ways. It does the

same things as django-admin but along with that, it also sets the

DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable in order to point to

your project’s settings. Usually, it is better to make use of

manage.py rather than the django-admin in case you are working on

a single project.

Q27. Explain the use of ‘migrate’ command in

Django?
In Django, migrations are used to propagate changes made to the

models. The migrate command is basically used to apply or unapply

migrations changes made to the models. This command basically

synchronizes the current set of models and migrations with the

database state. You can use this command with or without

parameters. In case you do not specify any parameter, all apps

will have all their migrations running.

Q28. How to view and filter items from the

database?
In order to view all the items from your database, you can make

use of the ‘all()’ function in your interactive shell as follows:

• XYZ.objects.all()     where XYZ is some class that you have

created in your models
To filter out some element from your database, you either use the

get() method or the filter method as follows:

• XYZ.objects.filter(pk=1)
• XYZ.objects.get(id=1)

Q29. Explain how a request is processed in

Django?
In case some user requests a page from some Django powered site,

the system follows an algorithm that determines which Python code

needs to be executed. Here are the steps that sum up the

algorithm:

1.Django first determines which root URLconf or URL

configuration module is to be used
2.Then, that particular Python module is loaded and then Django
looks for the variable urlpatterns
3.These URL patterns are then run by Django, and it stops at
the first match of the requested URL
4.Once that is done, the Django then imports and calls the
given view
5.In case none of the URLs match the requested URL, Django
invokes an error-handling view

Django Interview Questions

Q30. How did Django come into existence?
Django basically grew from a very practical need. World Online

developers namely Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison started

using Python to develop its websites. As they went on building

intensive, richly interactive sites, they began to pull out a

generic Web development framework that allowed them to build Web

applications more and more quickly. In summer 2005, World Online

decided to open-source the resulting software, which is, Django.

Q31. How to use file-based sessions?
In order to make use of file-based sessions, you will need to set

the SESSION_ENGINE setting to “django.contrib.sessions.backends.

file”.

Q32. Explain the Django URLs in brief?

Django allows you to design your own URLs however you like. The

aim is to maintain a clean URL scheme without any framework

limitations. In order to create URLs for your app, you will need

to create a Python module informally called the URLconf or URL

configuration which is pure Python code and is also a mapping

between the URL path expressions to the Python methods. The length

of this mapping can be as long or short as required and can also

reference other mappings. When processing a request, the requested

URL is matched with the URLs present in the urls.py file and the

corresponding view is retrieved. For more details about this, you

can refer to the answer to Q29.

Q33. Give the exception classes present in

Django.
Django uses its own exceptions as well as those present in Python.

Django core exceptions are present in django.core.exceptions  class

some of which are mentioned in the table below:

Exception Description
Raised when you try to use your models

AppRegistryNotReady before the app loading process (initializes

the ORM) is completed.

This is the base class for DoesNotExist
ObjectDoesNotExist
exceptions
EmptyResultSet This exception may be raised if a query
 won’t return any result
This exception is raised by a model’s

FieldDoesNotExist _meta.get_field() function in case the

requested field does not exist

This is raised by a query if multiple

MultipleObjectsReturned objects are returned and only one object

was expected

Q34. Is Django stable?

Yes, Django is quite stable. Many companies like Instagram,

Discus, Pinterest, and Mozilla have been using Django for a

duration of many years now. Not just this, Websites that are built

using Django have weathered traffic spikes of over 50 thousand hits

per second.

Django Interview Questions

Q35. Does the Django framework scale?
Yes. Hardware is much cheaper when compared to the development

time and this is why Django is designed to make full use of any

amount of hardware that you can provide it. Django makes use of a

“shared-nothing” architecture meaning you can add hardware at any

level i.e database servers, caching servers or Web/ application

servers.

Q36. Is Django a CMS?

Django is not a CMS (content-management-system) . It is just a Web

framework, a tool that allows you to build websites.

Q37. What Python version should be used with

Django?
The following table gives you the details of the versions of

Python that you can use for Django:

Python 3 is actually the most recommended because it is fast, has

more features and is better supported. In the case of Python 2.7,

Django 1.1 can be used along with it but only till the year 2020.

Q38. Does Django support NoSQL?

NoSQL basically stands for “not only SQL”. This is considered as

an alternative to the traditional RDBMS or the relational

Databases.  Officially, Django does not support NoSQL databases.

However, there are third-party projects, such as Django non-rel,

that allow NoSQL functionality in Django. Currently, you can use

MongoDB and Google App Engine.

Q39. How can you customize the functionality

of the Django admin interface?
There are a number of ways to do this. You can piggyback on top of

an add/ change form that is automatically generated by Django, you

can add JavaScript modules using the js parameter. This parameter

is basically a list of URLs that point to the JavaScript modules

that are to be included in your project within a <script> tag. In

case you want to do more rather than just playing around with

from, you can exclusively write views for the admin.

Q40. Is Django better than Flask?

Django is a framework that allows you to build large projects. On

the other hand, Flask is used to build smaller websites but flask

is much easier to learn and use compared to Django. Django is a

full-fledged framework and no third-party packages are required.

Flask is more of a lightweight framework that allows you to

install third-party tools as and how you like. So, the answer to

this question basically depends on the user’s need and in case the

need is very heavy, the answer is definitely, Django.

Django Interview Questions

Q41. Give an example of a Django view.
A view in Django either returns an HttpResponse or raises an

exception such as Http404. HttpResponse contains the objects that

consist of the content that is to be rendered to the user.

EXAMPLE:

from django.http import HttpResponse

def hello_world(request):
html = "
<h1>Hello World!</h1>

"
return HttpResponse(html)
Q42. What should be done in case you get a message saying “Please

enter the correct username and password” even after entering the
right details to log in to the admin section?

In case you have entered the right details and still not able to

login to the admin site, cross verify if the user account

has is_active and is_staff  attributes set to True. The admin site

allows only those users for whom these values are set to True.

Q43. What should be done in case you are not

able to log in even after entering the right
details and you get no error message?
In this case, the login cookie is not being set rightly. This

happens if the domain of the cookie sent out by Django does not
match the domain in your browser. For this, you must change

the SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN setting to match that of your browser.

Q44. How can you limit admin access so that

the objects can only be edited by those
users who have created them?
Django’s ModelAdmin class provides customization hooks using

which, you can control the visibility and editability of objects

in the admin. To do this, you can use

the get_queryset() and has_change_permission().

Q45. What to do when you don’t see all

objects appearing on the admin site?
Inconsistent row counts are a result of missing Foreign Key values

or if the Foreign Key field is set to null=False. If

the ForeignKey  points to a record that does not exist and if that

foreign is present in the list_display  method, the record will not

be shown the admin changelist.

Q46. What do you mean by the csrf_token?

The csrf_token is used for protection against Cross-Site Request

Forgeries. This kind of attack takes place when a malicious

website consists of a link, some JavaScript or a form whose aim is

to perform some action on your website by using the login

credentials of a genuine user.

Q47. Does Django support multiple-column

Primary Keys?
No. Django only supports single-column Primary Keys.
Q48. How can you see the raw SQL queries
that Django is running?
First, make sure that your DEBUG setting is set to True. Then,

type the following commands:

from django.db import connection

connection.queries

Q49. Is it mandatory to use the model/

database layer?
No. The model/ database layer is actually decoupled from the rest

of the framework.

Q50. How to make a variable available to all

the templates?
You can make use of the RequestContext in case all your templates

require the same objects, such as, in the case of menus. This

method takes an HttpRequest as its first parameter and it

automatically populates the context with a few variables,

according to the engine’s

context_processors configuration option.

With this, we have reached the end of this article on Django

Interview Questions. I hope you are clear with all that has been

shared with you in this article. Make sure you practice as much as

possible and revert your experience.