How-tos

Helpful hints and common patterns.

Minimal nanodjango site

Nanodjango is a perfect way to build a minimal static site generator.

Create a mysite.py:

# /// script
# dependencies = ["nanodjango", "django-nanopages", "django-browser-reload"]
# ///
from nanodjango import Django

app = Django()
pages = app.pages("/", "pages/")

if  __name__ == "__main__":
  app.run()

Run it using uv (or pipx or similar) - this will listen on port 8000:

uv run mysite.py 0:8000

Build it to a static site using the django-distill integration:

pip install nanodjango django-nanopages
nanodjango manage mysite.py distill-local static_site/

Breadcrumbs

You can create breadcrumbs by walking the the page hierarchy.

Warning

This will need to load every file in the path to get the page title, so could be quite slow if used directly in production. You would either want to use the django-distill integration to build it as a static site, or write a management command to loop over your pages and generate an index.

You could implement this as a template tag:

from django import template
from django.utils.safestring import mark_safe

register = template.Library()


@register.simple_tag(takes_context=True)
def breadcrumbs(context):
    page = context.get("page")
    if not page:
        return ""

    # Split the request path into parts
    parts = [p for p in page.request_path.split("/") if p]
    if not parts:
        # Root index page has no breadcrumbs
        return ""

    links = []
    # Build breadcrumbs by walking up the path
    for i, part in enumerate(parts):
        # Get the path to this level
        path_parts = parts[: i + 1]
        request_path = "/".join(path_parts)

        # Get the page at this level
        crumb_page = page.pages.get_page(request_path)
        if crumb_page:
            url = crumb_page.get_absolute_url()
            title = crumb_page.title
            links.append(f'<a href="{url}">{title}</a>')

    return mark_safe(f"<ul><li>{'</li><li>'.join(links)}</li></ul>")