Does Django Work With Sanity?
Django and Sanity work together seamlessly as a backend-headless CMS pair, with Django handling API logic and Sanity providing structured content management.
Quick Facts
How Django Works With Sanity
Django pairs excellently with Sanity by acting as your application backend while Sanity serves as your headless CMS. Django handles authentication, business logic, and database operations, while Sanity manages all structured content with real-time collaboration features. You fetch content from Sanity's API (REST or GROQ) within Django views or serializers, typically using the `sanity-client` library or simple HTTP requests. The architecture is clean: Django renders pages, serves APIs, or processes forms, while Sanity content flows in via webhooks or on-demand API calls. This separation means your content editors work independently from your development team, and you can version content changes separately from code deployments. Django's ORM handles relational data while Sanity handles hierarchical, document-based content perfectly suited for headless scenarios.
Best Use Cases
Quick Setup
pip install django sanity-client requests# settings.py
SANITY_PROJECT_ID = 'your-project-id'
SANITY_DATASET = 'production'
SANITY_API_TOKEN = 'your-api-token' # for authenticated requests
# views.py
from django.shortcuts import render
from django.views.decorators.cache import cache_page
import requests
@cache_page(60 * 5) # Cache for 5 minutes
def blog_posts(request):
query = '*[_type == "post"] | order(publishedAt desc) [0...10]'
url = f'https://{settings.SANITY_PROJECT_ID}.api.sanity.io/v2021-06-07/data/query/{settings.SANITY_DATASET}'
response = requests.get(url, params={'query': query})
posts = response.json()['result']
return render(request, 'posts.html', {'posts': posts})Known Issues & Gotchas
API rate limits when fetching Sanity content on every request without caching
Fix: Implement Django caching (Redis/Memcached) for Sanity responses, use webhooks to invalidate cache on content changes, or cache at the view/template level with appropriate TTLs
N+1 query problems when resolving nested Sanity references in templates or serializers
Fix: Use Sanity's GROQ query language to deeply fetch related documents in a single query, or batch fetch references client-side before rendering
Stale content if relying only on scheduled polling instead of webhooks
Fix: Set up Sanity webhooks to POST to Django endpoints that trigger cache invalidation immediately on content publish
CORS issues when fetching Sanity API from browser-side Django templates
Fix: Fetch Sanity content server-side in Django views/middleware rather than client-side, or configure Sanity project CORS settings appropriately
Alternatives
- •Next.js with Sanity: JavaScript-native headless stack with built-in static generation and incremental revalidation
- •Strapi with Django REST Framework: self-hosted headless CMS paired with Django for hybrid architectures requiring on-premise solutions
- •WordPress REST API with Django: traditional CMS approach if you need WordPress-specific plugins alongside Django backends
Resources
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