Formula - Django Unfold Admin Demo
The Formula repository contains a sample project build upon the Unfold theme for Django. It includes the best practices when it comes to Unfold but keep in mind that it does not incorporate any more in-depth business logic. Everything is composed just for demonstration purposes.
Table of contents
Installation
First of all, it is required to create new .env file containing environment variables for the project. In this case, there are just two most important variables needed to be configured. If you are on local machine, set DEBUG=1 to enable debug mode for further development. Second variable is SECRET_KEY which needs to be configured with some random long and secure string. Project is quite simple and it should be possible to run it without Docker at all. Make sure Python 3.13 is installed together with Poetry and follow the commands below to install all required dependencies and run migrations.
git clone [email protected]:unfoldadmin/formula.git
Run these commands inside formula directory, to install all dependencies and to run all migrations.
docker compose up
Create the admin user or you can't access to the instance.
docker compose exec web python manage.py createsuperuser
Run the command below to start the local development server.
Loading sample data
After successful installation, database will be empty and there will be no data to observe through the admin area. Unfold provides some sample data available under formula/fixtures. These data can be loaded via commands below. It is important to run this command against empty database so primary keys will match.
docker compose exec web python manage.py loaddata formula/fixtures/*
Custom Dashboard
The Formula demonstration project includes a custom dashboard. All components available in the dashboard are custom-made just for showcase and are not a part of Unfold. It means that any real data are used there and in case that real data are involved it is necessary to pass additional data into the template from the database.
All custom widgets used in Formula are located inside formula/templates/admin/components/. The main layout for the dashboard is created by overriding index.html and the content can be found here formula/templates/admin/index.html. For more information check official Unfold documentation.
Compiling Styles
When creating a custom admin dashboard, you are going to locate all your HTML code with Tailwind classes in your project, so newly added dashboard styles are not compiled. To do so, the first thing which is needed is to edit UNFOLD variable in settings.py and add STYLES key pointing at the new CSS stylesheet containing all new styles.
# settings.py
from django.templatetags.static import static
UNFOLD = {
"STYLES": [
lambda request: static("css/styles.css"),
],
}
To compile new styles, run one of the commands below depending on your needs. To see what exactly the commands are doing and how the files are linked check scripts section inside package.json.
npm run tailwind:build # one-time build
npm run tailwind:watch # watch all files for changes
Before compiling the styles it is important to install all node dependencies as well which in our case contain just TailwindCSS and its typography plugin for styling formatted blocks of texts inside the WYSIWYG editor.
npm install
