High-level overview¶

The Django source code repository uses Git to track changes to the code over time, so you’ll need a copy of the Git client (a program called git) on your computer, and you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the basics of how Git works.

Git’s website offers downloads for various operating systems. The site also contains vast amounts of documentation.

The Django Git repository is located online at github.com/django/django. It contains the full source code for all Django releases, which you can browse online.

The Git repository includes several branches:

• main contains the main in-development code which will become the next packaged release of Django. This is where most development activity is focused.
• stable/A.B.x are the branches where release preparation work happens. They are also used for bugfix and security releases which occur as necessary after the initial release of a feature version.

The Git repository also contains tags. These are the exact revisions from which packaged Django releases were produced, since version 1.0.

A number of tags also exist under the archive/ prefix for archived work.

The source code for the Djangoproject.com website can be found at github.com/django/djangoproject.com.

The main branch¶

If you’d like to try out the in-development code for the next release of Django, or if you’d like to contribute to Django by fixing bugs or developing new features, you’ll want to get the code from the main branch.

Note that this will get all of Django: in addition to the top-level django module containing Python code, you’ll also get a copy of Django’s documentation, test suite, packaging scripts and other miscellaneous bits. Django’s code will be present in your clone as a directory named django.

To try out the in-development code with your own applications, place the directory containing your clone on your Python import path. Then import statements which look for Django will find the django module within your clone.

If you’re going to be working on Django’s code (say, to fix a bug or develop a new feature), you can probably stop reading here and move over to the documentation for contributing to Django, which covers things like the preferred coding style and how to generate and submit a patch.

Stable branches¶

Django uses branches to prepare for releases of Django. Each major release series has its own stable branch.

These branches can be found in the repository as stable/A.B.x branches and will be created right after the first alpha is tagged.

For example, immediately after Django 1.5 alpha 1 was tagged, the branch stable/1.5.x was created and all further work on preparing the code for the final 1.5 release was done there.

These branches also provide bugfix and security support as described in Supported versions.

For example, after the release of Django 1.5, the branch stable/1.5.x receives only fixes for security and critical stability bugs, which are eventually released as Django 1.5.1 and so on, stable/1.4.x receives only security and data loss fixes, and stable/1.3.x no longer receives any updates.

Tags¶

Each Django release is tagged and signed by the releaser.

The tags can be found on GitHub’s tags page.