Django or Django Rest Framework

Question

I have made a certain app in Django, and I know that Django Rest Framework is used for building APIs. However, when I started to read about Django Rest Framework on their websit

Answer 1

Whether you need an api depends on what you want to do. For example, if you want to access everything in your Django models from a mobile device AND a web-app, you would want to use DRF.

Why? Consider the case that you are developing an iOS app that users can sign into and you want to use Django as your backend. If you also want to have a website that they can use to change around their app's profile information (say, update their email address or upload a picture), you would need a way to share the information in your Django models with both a website and the iOS device. How can this be done? By giving the user the ability to create/read/update/delete data by simply telling it a url to go to. Now, if you want to access information from the model you can do it from multiple devices, since any device can visit a url.

However, if you're just building a simple webapp/webpage and keep it all in one place, you can just use straight Django.

Side note: it's a pretty popular opinion that you should try to separate your frontend from your backend as much as possible. In this case, if you want to use some frontend development framework like React, Angular, or Vue, it's gonna get messy trying to include all those resources in the Django template pages even if you only want a simple web app/web page. In this case, you would use DRF to set up your backend, and just hit the urls from the frontend using a tool like axios. In this scenario, your frontend would likely be hosted on something like Node.

Again, what you decide to use really just depends on what you want out of your app/site and how comfortable you are with each tool.