Django interview Q&A and practical tips for beginner developers

Django……Isn’t that your favorite framework? (especially if you’re new to the world of programming).

Yes! This is…

Have you tried to learn this framework and build some projects?

If the answer is yes, then here is the next question……

Do you understand the full process of the project?

If the answer is yes, then here’s another question (don’t be upset now…… Ha ha…… )

Can you express in your own words the concepts you learned from the project?

If the answer is yes again, then congratulations, you don’t need to read tons of articles about Django interview questions…… All you have to do is take a look at these questions and the answers will automatically pop into your mind, and this article introduces you to the most common Django interview questions and answers.

This framework is the most popular in the industry, which is why most people jump into it (of course, money is another factor). If you’re an experienced developer, then you’ll definitely check the reasons behind its popularity, and for that, you’ll examine what problems Django can solve in your application? Why is it better than other frameworks and what are some of the popular Django interview questions? Or why is it good to build apps on Django? What are some Django interview question and answer tips?

Django Interview Questions and Answers Collection

If you’ve put in the effort to build some projects and understand the concept of the framework, then you just need to apply for the right job and face the interview.

Now coming to the main title of this blog, we are going to discuss some of the Django interview questions that you may encounter during your interview, but before we proceed, we recommend that you read the content given below carefully.

Quick instructions!

If you are just looking for interview questions and believe that reading these questions and memorizing their answers will help you complete the interview, then my friend, when you are faced with an interview, this will not work.

Django Interview Questions and Answers Collection: Always remember that interviewers prefer to hire candidates who have hands-on experience and are able to solve problems in Django applications. Most likely they won’t hire someone to come and attend the interview, read about 20-30 Django interview questions without any real-world experience.

Just reading 30-40 interview questions (in any language or framework) and facing the interview without any real-world experience won’t work in software development. Because there you won’t be asked to write essays for some theory exams.

There you have to build the actual software and in this case, no matter what kind of questions the interviewer will ask, his/her sole purpose is to check the candidate’s comprehension of the framework, comprehension of the concept of the framework, understanding of how things are connected, understanding of the complete process of the framework.

You can start by reading the theory, reading the questions, and then building some projects, or you can build some projects, and then reading the theory and interview questions. But the whole idea here is to do both…… Don’t miss a thing.

Now let’s get started with the interview questions……

We will also discuss what kind of answer the interviewer is looking for or why he/she is asking a particular question.

Django Interview Questions

Django Interview Q&A Tips: No matter what questions we’re going to discuss here, don’t expect the same questions to come up every interview. Not every interview will be the same. The questions may vary depending on the person attending the interview. But yes, these are the most basic and most common questions, and we’ve sorted this out considering the position of a junior Django developer.

These questions will most likely be asked during the interview to check the candidate’s ability to have at least a basic understanding of the framework. Before applying for a job, make sure you mention the project in your portfolio. Mention what you’ve done in your project using this amazing framework. What features did you build, or what problems did you solve. This will give you insight into how well you understand the framework.

The interviewer doesn’t want to have a Q&A session. He/she will try to build a relationship with you, and he/she will try to get to know you. So, if the interviewer is asking about this project or what you are currently doing, then talk about it smoothly and try to control the interview. Expand on your answers and dive into the details instead of just giving yes or no answers.

Don’t cheat in interviews. Build rapport with the interviewer and see your interviewer as a team member or mentor who will work with you on a project in the future. When you get into the details of the project, an interviewer learns what you already know. You just need to limit the number of questions you have, and the interviewer won’t ask the 50 questions from his/her list.

If you are stuck with a certain question, then don’t give the wrong answer, just let the interviewer know if you know anything about the project. You can say “I’ve done this in my project, but things are just blank.” I don’t remember what the exact command was, but I think it was like this”. Now you can try to elaborate on these issues. It’s perfectly fine for the interviewer and won’t leave any negative impression.

What are the Top Django Interview Questions? Now let’s start with the problem……

1. How familiar are you with Python?

Note: There are some prerequisites that an interviewer is looking for. He/she wants to know about your Python skills. How familiar you are with it, what you did with Python. He won’t spend much time on this, but obviously, if you’re a Django developer, then you’re going to need to know that.

Answer: Let the interviewer know what courses you have taken, what kind of projects you have done, and how much you have expanded on this language. books and other resources, etc.

2. What is Django?

Note: From here the interviewer will get into the details and he/she will try to get an idea of how well you know Django. Of course, this question also depends on how you interpret the Django projects mentioned in your portfolio. If the interviewer doubts your knowledge of Django, then he/she will definitely throw this question.

A: “Django is a Python-based web framework. Just as we use ExpressJS or NodeJS for JavaScript and Laravel for PHP to build the backend part of the application, Django is used for Python for the same purpose.” Not limited to giving the same response, but this response will clarify that you know “what is a framework”. If you mention several frameworks in your answer, then the interviewer will understand that you know the concept of frameworks and don’t need to have an in-depth understanding of the concept of frameworks.

3. What can you build with Django?

Note: Basically, the answer that the interviewer wants is that you know what Django is capable of. You understand what Django is for. Usually, people give examples of Django that can be used to build social media networks, e-commerce sites, but if you want a good response, mention the names of some companies.

Answer: “Django functionality is anything, it’s used by companies like Udemy, Pinterest, Instagram, Dropbox, etc.” The interviewer will understand that you know Django and that you know it has a lot of capabilities. You’re learning what you’ve done and what it can do. You can also mention APIs and how they can help build some good applications.

Correct explanation of the problem. 4 and 5 are really important. If you can’t explain what Django is and what it’s capable of doing, then the interviewer will be worried.

From here the interviewer may get into the details, and he/she will quickly ask some questions to make sure that you have addressed them. You haven’t just heard of the framework, or you haven’t done any rote learning. The interviewer will judge rashly here because no one remembers the exact code in each command or development. Most people just google something and fix it. But you should remember the most basic commands or the most basic things in Django.

4. What are some popular Django interview questions? What’s the difference between a Project and an app?

Note: Include examples in your answer to distinguish between the two.

A: “A project is like a whole environment. It’s the foundation of your website, and the application is like a component of that website that holds the project logic. A project is like a configuration for your website, and an application is a component of your project that is created to perform specific actions in your application.

Django Interview Questions and Answers Collection: A project is made up of many applications, so a project can have n applications and an application can have multiple projects. Here, you can give an example of facebook.com and structure it to explain it better. Facebook will be considered as one project, whereas news feeds, profiles, groups are the components of different apps in the whole of Facebook.

So for different tasks, a project can be divided into various small applications that focus on specific functional areas.

5. How do we initialize a project?

Answer: $ django-admin startproject projectname

6. How do we initialize an application?

Answer: Common Django interview questions and answers – $python manage.py startapp appname

7. What is the purpose of settings.py documents?

Django Interview Q&A Tips: Note: The settings.py is the most important file in the project, and it contains all the configuration of the application. Give the best explanation for the settings.py file. The interviewer will check your technical understanding of Django.

A: settings.py contains the configuration of the project, such as database connections, application configurations, absolute path values, static file configurations, and the overall command center for the project.

8. How do we start our dev server?

Answer: $ python manage.py runserver

9. What is the MVT structure in Django? What is a model? What is a View? What is a template?

A: A model is a class-based representation of a database table. It stands for database structure.

Views are basic business logic, and it doesn’t deal with how the data looks like (like MVC structures). It represents the reality of the data. View data that determines what should be triggered when a particular URL is clicked. What needs to be returned, such as templates, responses, and so on. Basically, the view returns a template, which is the connection between the model and the template.

The template layer returns the HTML layout. It handles the rendering part of the response. 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 the Django admin panel?

Note: This is one of the main features of Django, so an interviewer may ask you this question.

A: The Django admin panel is a graphical user interface for managing tasks. By default, the admin panel is built with Django, and you don’t need to build it from scratch like we do in other languages. You can quickly set up an admin panel to manage your data and access it. The development process becomes faster, and it becomes easier for developers to perform administrative activities.

11. What is a URL pattern?

Note: This is another essential thing you should definitely know about Django. The interviewer wants to know if you know how to configure URLs in a Django app.

Answer: Correctly explain how routing works in Django using the URL pattern.

URLs determine website routing. We create a python module or a file urls.py in the applicationThis file determines the navigation of your website. When a user clicks on a specific URL path in the browser, it matches the URL in the urls.py file. After that, the appropriate view method is retrieved, and the user gets a response to the requested URL.

12. What is the purpose of the following commands?

  • python manage.py makemigrations
  • Python manage.py migration

Note: This is another essential thing in Django. You just need to explain what these two commands do in a Django application.

A: The makemigration command scans the model in the application and creates a new set of migrations based on the changes we make in the model file. This command generates an SQL command, and after executing this command we get a new migration file. After you run this command, the table is not created in the database.

Now to apply these changes in our database, we execute the migrate command. The migrate command executes the SQL command (generated in makemigrations) and forces changes to the database. After you run this command, the table is created.

13. Where do we store templates?

Answer: What are some popular Django interview questions? There are a number of different ways to store templates. We can store it in the default application structure. Django apps will usually tell you to store them in a subfolder in a folder called templates (whatever your app name is), and then you can put all the templates there. You can also manually assign this value to a settings.py file. In this file, you’ll find a variable called Template, and within this variable you’ll find a list called DIRS. Here, you can mention the paths to the templates and let Django know where to find them.

14. Django Template Language: What do double curly braces mean and what do percent signs mean? (The interviewer may give an example)

<h2>{{name}}</h2>

Django Interview Questions and Answers Collection: Note: Interviewers want to know how well you know how to use templates. You have a good understanding of it, you know how to pass the data, and then set the variables in the template.

A: Curly braces are just placeholders for variables. This allows us to output dynamic data. Curly braces with a percent sign are blocks of code that we can write backend Pythonic logic in a template. 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 do I include and inherit files in my application?

A: “With the include tag, we can include parts of another HTML template”. The correct explanation for inheritance and extension is “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 tags in the block to extend the template.” (Read the article Django template tag to elaborate on your answer)

{% 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 do we set up a database in a Django application?

Django interview Q&A tips: Note: By default, Django comes with its own SQLite database, but in real life, companies don’t use it. So here the interviewer wants to hear that you know something outside of the SQLite database system where you don’t just rely on the default database system. You also learn how to connect to another database, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. Mention where you can configure the database in your Django project.

A: We need to configure our database in the settings.py file. By default, SQLite is mentioned there, and we need to change this accordingly. You can also give an example of setting up a database like MySQL or PostgreSQL.

17. What is a static file?

A: This is where we store attached files like CSS files, JavaScript files, images, or any type of static file. We usually store them in separate folders, for example in the js folder where we store all the JavaScript files and in the image folder we store all the images. We store these files in a subdirectory of the project application called static.

18. What is Media Root?

A: Media roots are used to upload user-generated content. We can provide user-uploaded media files from MEDIA_ROOT.

19. How do I query all the items in a database table?

Answer: XYZ.objects.all() where XYZ is a class created in the model.

20. How do I query an item from a database table?

Answer: XYZ.objects.get(id=1) where XYZ is a class created in the model.

Note: We have just mentioned two examples of database query questions, but the interviewer may ask more questions. He/she can add more complexity to the query, and then you will have to answer it. So, be prepared to do more database queries in Django.

21. WHAT IS CSRF TOKEN?

Answer: What are some popular Django interview questions? CSRF tokens help defend against cross-site request forgery 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 usually send these along with our forms. In short, we simply protect our data from any type of malicious activity. We can include { % csrf_token % } in the form of the template to protect our data.

22. HTML/CSS/Bootstrap skill level?

Note: This is another premise question, as you will definitely encounter code in HTML and CSS during development. You’re going to have to handle it dynamically with Django. So an interviewer wants to check your basic understanding of both.

Answer: Common Django interview questions and answers – Again, if you’ve already built some projects, let them know what you’re doing in HTML and CSS, or how you’re working on them dynamically. How to build pages or templates and how to code them with Django in your application. You can also expand on the answer by mentioning the type of template or page you’ve designed in HTML and CSS and how you render it dynamically.

23. Have you ever done JavaScript? Do you have experience with this?

Note: If you don’t know JavaScript, chances are the interviewer won’t interface with you for this, but if you’ve already worked on it when building your project in Django, that’s a good plus. As a web developer, you’ll be using JavaScript a lot, and having prior experience in this area will give you some advantages. If you don’t know, that’s totally fine, but knowledge of JavaScript will increase your chances of being selected.

A: If you know JavaScript, let the interviewer know what you’re doing in JavaScript, or what features you’ve built into JavaScript and Django.

Summary of Django interview Q&A tips

Django’s interview questions are not limited to this. There are a lot of concepts to know besides this collection of Django interview questions and answers, but the most important is what you mentioned in your portfolio and what you did in your project. You’ll find most of the questions from there. It also depends on the interviewer, the name of the company, the nature of the job, and the position you’re applying for. Build projects, face problems, solve problems, and you’ll learn more about Django. That’s how you can be better prepared for Django interview questions.