ASGI chat using Django channels pt 2

Posted under » Django on 14 July 2026

Continue from part 1.

When Django accepts an HTTP request, it consults the root URLconf to lookup a view function, and then calls the view function to handle the request. Similarly, when Channels accepts a WebSocket connection, it consults the root routing configuration to lookup a consumer, and then calls various functions on the consumer to handle events from the connection.

It is good practice to use a common path prefix like /ws/ to distinguish WebSocket connections from ordinary HTTP connections because it will make deploying Channels to a production environment in certain configurations easier.

Put the following code in chat/routing.py:

from django.urls import re_path
from . import consumers

websocket_urlpatterns = [
    re_path(r"ws/socket-server/$", consumers.ChatConsumer.as_asgi()),
]

We call the as_asgi() classmethod in order to get an ASGI application that will instantiate an instance of our consumer for each user-connection. This is similar to Django’s as_view(), which plays the same role for per-request Django view instances.

# chat/consumers.py. A Python class on the server side that acts similarly to Django Views, but specifically handles the WebSocket lifecycle (`connect`, `receive`, `disconnect`, and `broadcast`).

import json
from channels.generic.websocket import WebsocketConsumer

class ChatConsumer(WebsocketConsumer):
    def connect(self):
        self.accept()

    def disconnect(self, close_code):
        pass

    def receive(self, text_data):
        text_data_json = json.loads(text_data)
        message = text_data_json["message"]

        self.send(text_data=json.dumps({"message": message}))

So views -> consumers and url -> routing.

Continue to part 3.