Installation

Channels is available on PyPI - to install it run:

python -m pip install -U channels["daphne"]

This will install Channels together with the Daphne ASGI application server. If you wish to use a different application server you can pip install channels, without the optional daphne add-on.

Once that’s done, you should add daphne to the beginning of your INSTALLED_APPS setting:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    "daphne",
    "django.contrib.auth",
    "django.contrib.contenttypes",
    "django.contrib.sessions",
    "django.contrib.sites",
    ...
)

This will install the Daphne’s ASGI version of the runserver management command.

You can also add "channels" for Channel’s runworker command.

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')
# Initialize Django ASGI application early to ensure the AppRegistry
# is populated before importing code that may import ORM models.
django_asgi_app = get_asgi_application()

application = ProtocolTypeRouter({
    "http": django_asgi_app,
    # 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, daphne 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. Daphne 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, make sure daphne is at 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