Architecture

Discover the architecture of the back-end!

What's the back-end?

The back-end is the part of the application that runs on the server. Its role is to:

• send data from the database to the front-end
• receive data from the front-end and store it in the database
• check if the user is authenticated
• check the permissions of the user to access content

In our case, the back-end is built with the Django framework.

How is it organized?

Each feature is stored in an app. For example, we currently have these apps on Nantral Platform: account, groups, events, roommates, mentorship...

Then, each app is organized as explained in the schema above. We have:

• the models in the models.py files
• the views in the views.py or api_views.py files
• the serializers in the serializers.py files
• the urls in the urls.py or api_urls.py files

The old (legacy) back-end

In some apps, you can also find two other types of files: forms and templates. Their job is to replace the serializers, to return a full HTML page instead of just some data.

These files replace the front-end. They were used on Nantral Platform before the React front-end was created, but today, we try to remove these files and only use React for the front-end.

The helper files

There are 2 other types of files that are important, which are used to help developers:

• admin.py: they are used to configure the admin interface of django, which you can access with an admin account
• tests.py: they are used to write tests for the app, which are very important to be sure we don't break anything when we modify the code