Installation

Channels is available on PyPI - to install it, just run:

python -m pip install -U channels

Once that’s done, you should add channels to your INSTALLED_APPS setting:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    ...
    'channels',
)

Then, adjust your project’s asgi.py file, e.g. myproject/asgi.py, to wrap the Django ASGI application:

import os

from channels.routing import ProtocolTypeRouter
from django.core.asgi import get_asgi_application

os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'mysite.settings')

application = ProtocolTypeRouter({
    "http": get_asgi_application(),
    # Just HTTP for now. (We can add other protocols later.)
})

Note

Django 2.2 doesn’t have inbuilt ASGI support so we need to use Channel’s fallback alternative. Create myproject/asgi.py like this:

import os

import django
from channels.http import AsgiHandler
from channels.routing import ProtocolTypeRouter

os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'mysite.settings')
django.setup()

application = ProtocolTypeRouter({
  "http": AsgiHandler(),
  # Just HTTP for now. (We can add other protocols later.)
})

And finally, set your ASGI_APPLICATION setting to point to that routing object as your root application:

ASGI_APPLICATION = "myproject.asgi.application"

That’s it! Once enabled, channels will integrate itself into Django and take control of the runserver command. See Introduction for more.

Note

Please be wary of any other third-party apps that require an overloaded or replacement runserver command. Channels provides a separate runserver command and may conflict with it. An example of such a conflict is with whitenoise.runserver_nostatic from whitenoise. In order to solve such issues, try moving channels to the top of your INSTALLED_APPS or remove the offending app altogether.

Installing the latest development version

To install the latest version of Channels, clone the repo, change to the repo, change to the repo directory, and pip install it into your current virtual environment:

$ git clone git@github.com:django/channels.git
$ cd channels
$ <activate your project’s virtual environment>
(environment) $ pip install -e .  # the dot specifies the current repo