django-websocket-redis

Project home: https://github.com/jrief/django-websocket-redis

Detailed documentation on ReadTheDocs.

Online demo: http://django-websocket-redis.awesto.com/

Websockets for Django using Redis as message queue

This module implements websockets on top of Django without requiring any additional framework. For messaging it uses the Redis datastore and in a production environment, it is intended to work under uWSGI and behind NGiNX or Apache version 2.4.5 or later.

Features

Largely scalable for Django applications with many hundreds of open websocket connections.
Runs a separate Django main loop in a cooperative concurrency model using gevent, thus only one thread/process is required to control all open websockets simultaneously.
Full control over this separate main loop during development, so Django can be started as usual with ./manage.py runserver.
No dependency to any other asynchronous event driven framework, such as Tornado, Twisted or Socket.io/Node.js.
Normal Django requests communicate with this separate main loop through Redis which, by the way is a good replacement for memcached.
Optionally persisting messages, allowing server reboots and client reconnections.

If unsure, if this proposed architecture is the correct approach on how to integrate Websockets with Django, then please read Roberto De Ioris (BDFL of uWSGI) article about Offloading Websockets and Server-Sent Events AKA “Combine them with Django safely”.

Please also consider, that whichever alternative technology you use, you always need a message queue, so that the Django application can “talk” to the browser. This is because the only link between the browser and the server is through the Websocket and thus, by definition a long living connection. For scalability reasons you can't start a Django server thread for each of these connections.