Django… Isn’t it your favorite framework? (especially if you are new to the programming world)
Yes! It is…
Did you try to learn this framework and build some projects?
If the answer is Yes then here is the next question…
Did you understand the complete flow of the project?
Again if the answer is Yes then here is another question (don’t get annoyed now…lol…)
Can you articulate the concepts in your own words which you have learned from your project?
If the answer is again Yes then congratulations you don’t need to read tons of articles about the Django interview questions… You just need to take a look at the questions and the answer will automatically pop up in your mind.
This framework is the most popular framework in industries and this is the reason most people are jumping into it (surely money is another factor). If you’re an experienced developer then surely you will check the reason behind its popularity and for that, you will check what problems Django can resolve in an application? Why it’s better than other frameworks or why it’s good to build the application on Django?
If you already have put your efforts into building some projects and understanding the concept of this framework then all you just need to do is to apply for the right jobs and face the interviews.
Now coming to the main title of this blog, we will discuss some Django interview questions which you may encounter in interviews but before we go ahead we recommend you carefully read the lines given below.
A Quick Note!
If you’re someone who is just looking for the interview questions and believes that reading these questions and remembering the answer to them will help you in clearing the interview rounds then my friend this is not going to work when you will be facing the interviews.
Always remember that an interviewer will prefer to hire a candidate who can have practical exposure and who can solve the problems in Django applications. Most probably they won’t hire someone who has come for the interview reading some 20-30 Django interview questions without any practical exposure.
Reading only the 30-40 interview questions (any language or the framework) and facing the interview without any practical exposure won’t work in software development. Because there you won’t be asked to write the papers for some theoretical exams.
There you will have to build the actual software and in this case, no matter what kind of questions the interviewer will ask, his/her only intention would be to check the ability of the candidate about the understanding of the framework, about the understanding of the concepts, about the understanding of how things are connected, about the understanding of the complete flow of the framework.
You can read the theory, read the question and then build some projects, or you can build some projects and then read the theory and the interview question. But here the whole idea is to do both…don’t miss a single thing.
Now let’s start discussing the interview questions…
We will also discuss what kind of answer an interviewer is looking for or why he/she asked a specific question.
Django Interview Question
Whatever questions we are going to discuss here, do not expect the same questions in each interview. Not every interview is going to be the same. The questions can be different and depend on the person who is taking your interview. But yes these are the most basic ones and the most common questions, and we have compiled the question considering the position of junior level Django developer.
Most likely these questions are asked in the interviews to check the ability of the candidate for at least a basic understanding of the framework. Before applying for the jobs make sure that you mention the project in your portfolio. Mention the things that you have done in your project using this amazing framework. What features you have built, or what problems you have resolved. This will give you an insight that how deeply you understand this framework.
The interviewer doesn’t want to conduct a Q&A session. He/she will try to build a relationship with you and he/she will try to understand you. So in case if the interviewer is asking about the project or what you’re currently working on then smoothly speak about it and try to control the interview. Expand your answer and go into the details instead of just giving the answer in yes or no.
Don’t be fake in interviews. Build a rapport with the interviewer and treat your interviewer as a team member or mentor who is going to work with you on some project in the future. When you get into the detail of the project the interviewer understand that what things you already know. You just limit the number of questions for yourself and the interviewer won’t be asking the 50 numbers of questions from his/her list.
If you are stuck on some question then don’t give a wrong answer just let the interviewers know if you know anything about the project. You can say that “I have done this in my project, but things are just blanking out. I don’t remember what the exact command was, but I think it’s something like this “. Now you can try to elaborate on those questions. It’s completely ok for the interviewer, and it won’t make any negative impression.
Let’s start with the questions now…
1. How comfortable are you with Python?
Note: The interviewer is looking for some prerequisites. He/she wants to know your Python skills. How familiar are you with it and what have you done with Python. He won’t be spending too much time on that but obviously, if you’re a Django developer then you will need to know that.
Answer: Let the interviewer know what courses you have taken, what kind of project you have built, how much you have expanded yourself in this language. Books, and the other resources, etc.
2. What is Django?
Note: From here the interviewer will dig into the detail and he/she will try to understand that how well you know about Django. Of course, this question is also depends on how well you explained your Django project mentioned in your portfolio. If the interviewer will be in doubt about your knowledge in Django then he/she will throw this question for sure.
Answer: “Django is a Python-based web framework. Just like we use ExpressJS or NodeJS for JavaScript and Laravel for PHP to build the backend part of the application, Django is for Python for the same purpose”. It’s not restricted to give the same response, but this response will clarify that you know “what frameworks are”. If you mention a couple of frameworks in your response then the interviewer will understand that you know the concept of frameworks, and it’s not needed to get into the detail of the concept of the framework.
3. What can you build with Django?
Note: Basically the interviewer is expecting the answer that you know the capabilities of Django. You understand what Django is used for. Typically, people give the example that Django can be used to build social media networks, e-commerce websites but if you want to give a good response then mention some companies’ names.
Answer: “Django capabilities are anything and companies like Udemy, Pinterest, Instagram, Dropbox uses it.” The interviewer will understand that you know Django and you understand that it’s capable of a lot. You’re understanding what is done and what it can do. You can also mention the APIs and how APIs are helpful in building some good applications.
Proper explanation of questions no. 4 and 5 is really important. If you won’t be able to explain that what Django is and what it’s capable to do, then the interviewer will be concerned.
From here the interviewer may get into the detail and he/she is will rapid-fire some questions to make sure that you have worked with it. You haven’t just heard about this framework, or you haven’t done any kind of rote learning. The interviewer will judge pretty lightly here because nobody remembers each and every command or the exact code in development. Most people just Google out the things and solves the problem. But you should remember the most basic commands or the most basic things in Django.
4. What’s the difference between a Project and App?
Note: Include examples in your answer to differentiate between both.
Answer: “A project is like an overall environment. It’s the base of your website and an app is like a component of that website that holds the project logic. Project is like configuration of your website and app is the component of your project which are created to do a specific thing in your application.
A project is composed of many apps, so a single project can have n number of apps and a single app can be in several projects.” Here you can give the example of facebook.com and structure it out to explain it better. Facebook will be treated as a project and news feed, profile, groups are the components of the different apps within the entire Facebook.
So for different tasks, a project can be divided into various small apps and these apps are focused on a specific functional area.
5. How do we initialize a project?
Answer: $ django-admin startproject projectname
6. How do we initialize an app?
Answer: $ python manage.py startapp appname
7. What does the settings.py file do?
Note: settings.py is the most important file in your project that holds all the configurations of your application. Give your best explanation of the settings.py file. The interviewer will check your technical understanding of Django.
Answer: settings.py holds the configuration of the project like your database connection, apps configuration, absolute path values, static files configuration, and the overall command center to the project.
8. How do we start our development server?
Answer: $ python manage.py runserver
9. What is the MVT structure in Django? What are models? What are views? What are templates?
Answer: Models are the class-based representations of database tables. It represents the database structures.
The view is basically the business logic, and it doesn’t deal with how the data looks (like in MVC structure). It represents what the data actually is. View decides what data should be triggered when a specific URL is hit. What needs to be returned like templates, responses, and so on. Basically, views return the templates, and it is the connection between the model and the templates.
The template layer returns the HTML layout. It deals with the presentation part of the responses. How the response will be presented to the user.
With this answer, the interviewer will see your understanding of the model, view, and template.
10. What is Django Admin Panel?
Note: This is one of the key features of Django so the interviewer may ask this question to you.
Answer: Django admin panel is a kind of graphical user interface that is used for administrative tasks. Admin panel comes by default built with Django and you don’t need to build it from scratch as we do in other languages. You get the quick setup of the admin panel to manage your data and to access it. The development process becomes faster and also it becomes easy for the developers to perform administrative activities.
11. What are URL patterns?
Note: This is another basic stuff in Django which you should definitely know. The interviewer wants to know that you understand how to configure URLs in Django app.
Answer: Explain properly that how routing works in Django using URL patterns.
URLs decide the website routing. We create a python module or a file urls.py in the app. This file decides the navigation of your website. When a user hits a specific URL path in the browser it gets matched with the URLs present in the urls.py file. After that, a corresponding view method is retrieved and then the user gets the response back for the requested URL.
12. What do the following commands do?
- python manage.py makemigrations
- python manage.py migrate
Note: This is another basic stuff in Django. You just need to explain what is the role of both commands in the Django application.
Answer: makemigration command scan the model in your application and create a new set of migration based on the changes we make in the model file. This command generates the SQL command, and we get a new migration file after executing this command. Tables won’t be created in the database after running this command.
Now to apply these changes in our database we execute migrate command. migrate command executes the SQL commands (generated in makemigrations) and enforces the changes to the database. Tables will be created after running this command.
13. Where do we store templates?
Answer: There are different ways to store templates. We can store it in the default app structure. Django apps typically tell you to store in a folder called templates, in a subfolder (whatever your app name is), and then you can put all the templates there. You can also manually assign this value into the settings.py file. In this file, you will find a variable ‘templates’ and in this variable, you will find a list called DIRS. Here you can mention the path of your template and let Django know where to find them.
14. Django Templating Language: What do double curly braces mean and what does it mean with the percent signs? (the interviewer may show an example of that)
<h2>{{name}}</h2>
Note: The interviewer wants to know that you know very well that how to work with templating. You have a good understanding of it, and you know how to pass data and then set variables in the template.
Answer: Curly braces are just a placeholder for variables. This way we can output dynamic data. Curly braces with percent signs are code blocks where we can write the backend Pythonic logic in our templates. Now you can write one of the examples here. You can write a for loop or an if statement in the code block of the template.
{% for customer in customers %}
<tr>
<td>{{customer.name}}</td>
</tr>
{% endfor %}
15. How you can include and inherit files in your application?
Answer: “Using the include tag we can include the section of another HTML template”. A proper explanation of inherit and extends would be “If we have a main.html file, and we need to inherit this file then we can use the extends tag in the template where we want to extend it, and then we can add in block tags to extend the template.” (Read the article Django Template Tags to elaborate your answer more)
{% extends 'base/main.html' %}
{% include 'base/navbar.html' %}
{% block content %}
<h2>Template</h2>
{% endblock content %}
16. What database system do you prefer to use and how can we set up the database in Django application?
Note: By default, Django comes with the SQLite database but in real life, companies are not going to use it. So here the interviewer wants to listen that you know something beyond the SQLite database system, and you aren’t just relying on the default database system. You also understand how to connect another database like MySQL or PostgreSQL. Mention where you can configure your database in the Django project.
Answer: We need to configure our database in the settings.py file. By default, SQLite is mention there, and we need to change this setting accordingly. You can also give an example of setting a database like MySQL or PostgreSQL.
17. What are static files?
Answer: This is the place where we store the additional files like CSS files, JavaScript files, images, or any kind of static files. We typically store them in their separate folder like in the js folder all we store all the JavaScript files and in the images folder, we store all the images. We store these files in the subdirectory of the project app named static.
18. What is Media Root?
Answer: Media root is used to upload user-generated content. We can serve user-uploaded media files from MEDIA_ROOT.
19. How would you query all the items in the database table?
Answer: XYZ.objects.all() Where XYZ is some class created in the model.
20. How to query one item from the database table?
Answer: XYZ.objects.get(id=1) Where XYZ is some class created in the model.
Note: We just have mentioned two examples of questions of database queries, but the interviewer may ask more queries. He/She can add more complexity to the query, and then you will have to answer it. So prepare yourself with more database queries in Django.
21. What are CSRF Tokens?
Answer: CSRF tokens help against Cross-Site Request Forgeries attacks. This can be sent from a malicious site. Django comes with built-in protection against CSRF. We can use it in post, put or delete requests. We typically send these with our forms. In short, we’re just protecting our data from any kind of malicious activity. We can include { % csrf_token % } in our template’s form to protect our data.
22. HTML/CSS/Bootstrap skills level?
Note: This is another prerequisite question because in development you will surely encounter the code in HTML and CSS. You will have to deal with it dynamically using Django. So the interviewers want to check your basic understanding of both.
Answer: Again if you have built some projects then let them know what things you have done in HTML and CSS or how you dealt with it dynamically. How pages or the templates were built and how you coded them with Django in your application. You can also expand the answer by mentioning what kind of templates or page you designed in HTML and CSS and how you rendered it dynamically.
23. Have you worked on JavaScript? Any experience in it?
Note: If you don’t know JavaScript then most probably the interviewer is not going to dock you for this, but it would be a nice plus if you have worked on it while building your project in Django. As a web developer, you will be working with JavaScript a lot, and having prior experience in it will give you some advantage. If you don’t know then it’s completely fine but knowledge of JavaScript will increase the chances of getting selected.
Answer: If you know JavaScript then let the interviewer know that what you did in JavaScript or what kind of features you built-in JavaScript along with Django.
Final Thought
Interview questions are not limited here for Django. There are a lot of concepts to know, but the main thing is that what you have mentioned in your portfolio and what you have done in your project. Most of the questions you will find from there. It also depends on the interviewer, company name, nature of work, and the position you’re applying for. Build the project, face the problems, solve the issues, and you will learn more about Django. That’s how you will be more prepared for the Django interview questions.
