Using `fastn` With Django ..

.. or other backends.

If your backend is written in Python/Django, Ruby On Rails, Java, Go etc, you can use fastn to power the frontend of your application.

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Static Vs Dynamic

This feature works better with dynamic hosting. If you are using fastn in static site mode, then how the page looked when fastn build was called will be shown to everyone. But if you are using dynamic mode then this page would be regenerated on every page load.

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Deploying fastn Sites

`fastn` In The Front

fastn is being designed to be in the front of you backend application. The request from users browser first reach fastn, and is then either handled by fastn itself, say if it was for a static file, or for a route implemented by the fastn project.

Proxy Pass

fastn acts as a proxy pass if you configure it like this:

-- import: fastn

-- fastn.package: hello
endpoint: https://127.0.0.1:8000

Lang:

ftd

The endpoint tells you where the upstream server is. If fastn can not serve an incoming request based on the content of the fastn package, it will proxy the request to the provided endpoint.

SQL

If your fastn package needs some data, you can use the SQL processor to fetch data directly from the database, and avoid writing some APIs.

Calling Your APIs

If your fastn package needs some data, direct SQL access does not work for you, you can use HTTP processor to make HTTP request to your backend, fetch data from your fastn document.

This API call happens from server side, during the initial page generation.

Calling APIs from Frontend

If you want to call an API implemented in your backend, eg https://127.0.0.1:8080/api/get-user if you have configured the endpoint, to https://127.0.0.1:8080/, and your application is running on example.com, served by fastn serve, you can make an API request to example.com/api/get-user, and the request will go to fastn first, and fastn will forward the request to your backend, and return the response returned by backend to the browser.

This also helps in local development, as if you run your frontend server on one port, and your API server on another server, the API urls etc has to include full path, and cross origin issues may happen depending on how things are setup. In most production environment the domain for frontend and API is the same, and we usually use Nginx or some other proxy server to route to different servers depending on PATH based rules. With fastn acting as router, Nginx like proxy is not needed when doing local development.