Django-tornado-websockets’s documentation

Django-tornado-websockets is a useful solution to provide an easy way to use Tornado WebSockets with a Django application.

Important

Django-tornado-websockets is actually in alpha version!

Architecture

Example of an architecture using Tornado as WSGI server, Django and django-tornado-websockets

Example of an architecture using Tornado as WSGI server, Django and django-tornado-websockets

To use django-tornado-websockets’s WebSockets, you should use Tornado as a WSGI server where you will define handlers to handle an incoming request. Since we already have a WSGI server, it’s probably useless to try running Gunicorn or uWSGI as WSGI server. You can try to wrap Tornado WSGI server into Gunicorn/uWSGI WSGI server but... It’s a bit retarded I think (・_・ヾ...

Let’s explain this diagram:

  1. The client make a request to our web server with his web browser,
  2. Our web server (nginx, Apache, ...) pass this WSGI or WebSocket request to Tornado [1],
  3. If it is a WebSocket request, we pass it to tornado.websocket, otherwise it’s Django that will handle this request,
  4. We wait for a WebSocket response or a Django response,
  5. and 6. Then we return this response to the client.
[1]I forgot it on the diagram, but nginx or Apache has the job to deliver static files, it’s not Tornado’s work