Django: introducing django-orjson

Django: introducing django-orjson

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Title: Django: introducing django-orjson - Adam Johnson

URL Source: https://adamj.eu/tech/2026/07/15/introducing-django-orjson/

Markdown Content: 2026-07-15 Just as cars painted red are known to be faster, libraries implemented in Rust are also known to be faster. Today’s example is orjson, a Rusty replacement for Python’s built-in json module, boasting 10x faster serialization and 2x faster deserialization.

Such a library is great, but adopting it isn’t easy, especially when your framework uses json in many different parts. To help Django developers adopt orjson, I have created django-orjson, which provides a whole bunch of drop-in replacements for Django and Django REST Framework (DRF) components backed by orjson.

For example, there’s a version of JsonResponse:

from django_orjson.http import JsonResponse

def index(request): return JsonResponse({"title": "Hello, world!"})

…a test client with matching test case classes:

from django_orjson.test import SimpleTestCase

class IndexTests(SimpleTestCase): def test_index(self): response = self.client.get("/", headers={"accept": "application/json"}) assert response.status_code == 200 # response.json() uses orjson to parse the response body assert response.json() == {"title": "Hello, world!"}

…a version of Django’s json_script template tag:

{% load django_orjson %} {{ chart_data|json_script:"chart-data" }}

…and plenty more! All tested against the currently supported versions of Python and Django with 100% branch coverage.

While database queries tend to dominate the typical Django application’s runtime, the time spent in serialization and deserialization can still be significant. That can make adopting orjson a nearly free performance win, which I hope django-orjson makes almost trivial for you.

Django proposal

After seeing the initial version of django-orjson, Paolo Melchiorre decided to push for adding orjson support to Django itself, in the new feature proposal Pluggable JSON serialization/deserialization backend. He made a thorough list of all the places in Django that could use orjson, and the proposal has gathered 14 thumbs-ups at the time of writing.

If you’re interested in the topic of speeding up Django’s JSON handling, check out the proposal and add your thoughts to the discussion.

Fin

Please try out django-orjson today and send me feedback.

YAML, TOML, or JSON?

—Adam

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Tags:django