If you’re looking for career opportunities in web development, learning Django is one way to get your foot in the door. Not only is it a powerful tool for developing scalable web applications, but it’s also a skill hiring managers look for when filling open roles on their web development teams. But before you land your next dream role, you’ll need to get through the interview process.
When it comes to getting ready for the technical interview, any amount of time you spend going over potential questions you might be asked, the better prepared you’ll be. You can do this in a few different ways. You can do a mock interview and have a friend or family member ask you questions in a similar setup to how your real interview will be (for example, if you’ll be interviewing over Zoom, set up your mock interview over Zoom too), or you can practice answering questions out loud on your own. Writing out your answers to typical interview questions can also be good practice if you want to give that a try.
To help you prepare to answer Django interview questions, here are 15 practice questions and tips on how to answer them.
Learn something new for free
1. What is Django?
To kick off an interview, it’s common for the interviewee to ask a couple ice-breaker questions to help you calm your nerves a bit before the harder questions are asked. These questions can usually be answered quickly, and they’re considered “easy” questions.
In your answer to this ice-breaker question, you can mention that Django is an open-source web framework used for creating Python-based web applications. It was first publicly released in 2005 and named after Django Reinhardt, an influential 20th-century jazz guitarist.
Django is behind some of the most popular websites and web applications in the world, including Mozilla, Instagram, Bitbucket, and Nextdoor. However, since Django remains open-source, no single company fully controls how Django is developed. Instead, Django is maintained by the non-profit Django Software Foundation.
2. What are the big differences between Django and Flask?
Both Django and Flask are Python frameworks that help developers create web applications, but that’s about where the similarities end.
Django is a full-stack framework that adopts the “batteries-included” approach. It comes with everything you need to quickly develop a web application, including administration management, security features, and support for a variety of web content. Django is the preferred framework for large, complex projects that require high functionality and special features.
Flask, on the other hand, is a lightweight option. There are fewer features compared to Django, but that makes it easier for developers to get a small-scale web application up and running quickly. Since Flask is unopinionated, it’s up to the developer to make a lot of the decisions on how the application should run and what it should look like. Flask is the better framework for small-scale web application projects that don’t need the full feature set provided by Django.
Check out our in-depth article to learn more about Django vs. Flask and when to use each framework.
3. What are some of the major features of Django?
When answering this question you could weave in details from projects you’ve worked on in the past where you’ve incorporated these features. This is a great way to bring up some of your past work that you’re proud of, and if you have a project that’s related to one the company is currently working on — that’s even better. Some of the main features of Django you could consider discussing are templating, admin interface, object-relational mapping (ORM), testing framework, form handling, and session management and role-based permissions.
4. What are the biggest advantages of Django?
Django is one of the most popular web development frameworks today, and that’s because it offers developers and companies so many advantages. You could talk about Django’s “batteries-included” approach that provides everything you need to develop a full web application in your answer to this question. You could also mention how Django is written in Python, which is a flexible and widely used programming language, and how it’s compatible with major operating systems and most databases. Another advantage you can discuss is Django’s security features and administrative tools, as well as its extensive documentation and support community.
5. Is Django opinionated?
Developers tend to describe web frameworks as either “opinionated” or “unopinionated.” Opinionated frameworks are designed so that it’s easy to solve a specific problem but are less flexible at solving other problems. Unopinionated frameworks offer a lot more flexibility but offer fewer built-in tools.
Django is considered to be “somewhat opinionated.” In other words, Django comes with a set of components and tools to handle most web development tasks. But developers can often choose between multiple options in Django or add in support for their own preferred tools.
6. What files are created when you start a Django project?
When you initiate a Django project, the following files are created:
- manage.py: a module that provides commands for editing and interacting with the project
- _init_.py: an empty file indicating that the current directory contains a Python project
- settings.py: the current project settings
- urls.py: the project URLs
- wsgi.py: the entry point for web servers to connect to and interact with the Django project
7. How does the Django architecture work?
Django follows the Model View Template (MVT) architecture pattern. It consists of models that describe your data structure and database scheme, views that retrieve data from the models, perform calculations on the data, and control what people can see, and templates that control how data is presented to someone, including which views to display and how to format them.
8. What is a Django model?
Django models are Python classes that describe the project data, each attribute in a Django model corresponds to a specific field in the database. These models are abstractions — in other words, they automatically perform a lot of the tedious, complex tasks required to execute a single operation. For example, if you want to populate your model with the information contained in a database, Django will automatically perform all the SQL queries that are needed.
9. What is a Django view?
A Django view function is a special type of Python function that accepts a web request as input and outputs a particular web response. It takes what’s in the Django template file — usually from HTML, CSS, or javascript — and renders a web page.
Examples of Django view responses include HTML web page contents, an image, an XML document, or a redirect — essentially, anything that a web browser can render.
10. What’s in a Django template?
A Django template is a text file and can create any text-based format such as XML, HTML, and CSV. When the template is evaluated in Django, variables in the template are replaced with values, while tags control the logic flow of the template.
11. What’s the difference between a Django project and a Django app?
A Django app is a single web application that was created for a specific purpose, such as storing employee records or processing payments. A Django project is a collection of apps that in combination provide a full range of services and functions of a website(e.g. being able to both store employee records and process payments).
Don’t hesitate to use examples from your past work in your answer to this question. This is a great way to bring up your work while also answering the question.
12. What kinds of databases does Django support?
Django officially supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and SQLite.
NoSQL functionality is also available through third-party packages such as MongoDB partnered with PyMongo.
13. What are the inheritance styles in Django?
There are three types of possible inheritance styles in Django. The abstract base class is for referring to the parent class for information or fields to be used in the child class. The multi-table inheritance is used when you’re sub-classing an existing model and want a separate database table for each model. Lastly, proxy models are for when you only want to change how the model behaves in Python without changing the model fields.
14. How do you set up a static file in Django?
To set up static files in Django, generally, the following steps are required to set up the project:
- Confirm that django.contrib.staticfiles is included within the installed apps
- A static URL must be defined in the settings file
- Within the project templates, template tags are used to create the relative paths for each file
- All the relevant static files should be added to the project in a folder labeled ‘static’
Additionally, to deploy static files in production, there are several steps required that varies relative to the infrastructure used to serve the project.
15. How can you protect other people from editing objects in Django?
Django includes a ModelAdmin class, which provides customization hooks that you can use to control whether and how other people view or edit admin objects. To change permissions, use the get_queryset() and has_change_permission() methods.
More Django interview prep
Looking for a refresher on any of these topics? You can get a comprehensive review of Django in our course Build Python Web Apps with Django. This course covers templates, data, views, forms, accounts and authentication, and deploying in Django. Also, check out our courses on Python if you’re looking to review the basics or take your coding skills up a notch.
For more interview advice, check out our guide to acing the technical interview, as well as our tips on answering behavioral interview questions. If you’re asked to do a whiteboard interview at some point during the hiring process, here are tips to help you do your best during the whiteboard interview.
Before interview day, it’s also a good idea to go through your technical portfolio one last time so you can remind yourself of any details you want to bring up during your interview. Get more interview and job-hunting tips at our Career Center.And if you’re looking for ways to learn new skills or expand on your existing ones, check out our course catalog.
