django-components/docs/concepts/getting_started/your_first_component.md

title	weight
Create your first component	1

A component in django-components can be as simple as a Django template and Python code to declare the component:

from django_components import Component

class Calendar(Component):
    template = """
      <div class="calendar">
        Today's date is <span>{{ date }}</span>
      </div>
    """

Or a combination of Django template, Python, CSS, and Javascript:

from django_components import Component

class Calendar(Component):
    template = """
      <div class="calendar">
        Today's date is <span>{{ date }}</span>
      </div>
    """

    css = """
      .calendar {
        width: 200px;
        background: pink;
      }
    """

    js = """
      document.querySelector(".calendar").onclick = function () {
        alert("Clicked calendar!");
      };
    """

!!! note

With django-components, you can "inline" the HTML, JS and CSS code into the Python class,
as seen above.

You can set up [syntax highlighting](../../guides/setup/syntax_highlight.md),
but autocompletion / intellisense does not yet work.

So, in the example below we define the Django template in a separate file, `calendar.html`,
to allow our IDEs to interpret the file as HTML / Django file.

We'll start by creating a component that defines only a Django template:

1. Create project structure

Start by creating empty calendar.py and calendar.html files:

sampleproject/
├── calendarapp/
├── components/             🆕
│   └── calendar/           🆕
│       ├── calendar.py     🆕
│       └── calendar.html   🆕
├── sampleproject/
├── manage.py
└── requirements.txt

2. Write Django template

Inside calendar.html, write:

<div class="calendar">
  Today's date is <span>{{ date }}</span>
</div>

In this example we've defined one template variable date. You can use any and as many variables as you like. These variables will be defined in the Python file in get_context_data() when creating an instance of this component.

!!! note

The template will be rendered with whatever template backend you've specified in your Django settings file.

Currently django-components supports only the default `"django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates"` template backend!

3. Create new Component in Python

In calendar.py, create a subclass of Component to create a new component.

To link the HTML template with our component, set template_name to the name of the HTML file.

from django_components import Component

class Calendar(Component):
    template_name = "calendar.html"

!!! note

The path to the template file can be either:

1. Relative to the component's python file (as seen above),
2. Relative to any of the component directories as defined by
[`COMPONENTS.dirs`](../../reference/settings.md#django_components.app_settings.ComponentsSettings.dirs)
and/or [`COMPONENTS.app_dirs`](../../reference/settings.md#django_components.app_settings.ComponentsSettings.app_dirs)
(e.g. `[your apps]/components` dir and `[project root]/components`)

4. Define the template variables

In calendar.html, we've used the variable date. So we need to define it for the template to work.

This is done using Component.get_context_data(). It's a function that returns a dictionary. The entries in this dictionary will become available within the template as variables, e.g. as {{ date }}.

from django_components import Component

class Calendar(Component):
    template_name = "calendar.html"

    def get_context_data(self):
        return {
            "date": "1970-01-01",
        }

Now, when we render the component with Component.render() method:

Calendar.render()

It will output

<div class="calendar">
  Today's date is <span>1970-01-01</span>
</div>

And voilá!! We've created our first component.

Next, let's add JS and CSS to this component ➡️.