How to get Django and ReactJS to work together?

Question

New to Django and even newer to ReactJS. I have been looking into AngularJS and ReactJS, but decided on ReactJS. It seemed like it was edging out AngularJS as far as popular

Answer 1

A note for anyone who is coming from a backend or Django based role and trying to work with ReactJS: No one manages to setup ReactJS enviroment successfully in the first try :)

There is a blog from Owais Lone which is available from http://owaislone.org/blog/webpack-plus-reactjs-and-django/ ; however syntax on Webpack configuration is way out of date.

I suggest you follow the steps mentioned in the blog and replace the webpack configuration file with the content below. However if you're new to both Django and React, chew one at a time because of the learning curve you will probably get frustrated.

var path = require('path');
var webpack = require('webpack');
var BundleTracker = require('webpack-bundle-tracker');

module.exports = {
    context: __dirname,
    entry: './static/assets/js/index',
    output: {
        path: path.resolve('./static/assets/bundles/'),
        filename: '[name]-[hash].js'
    },
    plugins: [
        new BundleTracker({filename: './webpack-stats.json'})
    ],

 module: {
    loaders: [
      {
        test: /\.jsx?$/,
        loader: 'babel-loader',
        exclude: /node_modules/,
        query: {
          presets: ['es2015', 'react']
        }
      }
    ]
  },


  resolve: {
        modules: ['node_modules', 'bower_components'],
        extensions: ['.js', '.jsx']
    }
};