API stability

At the same time as making API stability a very high priority, Django is also committed to continual improvement, along with aiming for “one way to do it” (eventually) in the APIs we provide. This means that when we discover clearly superior ways to do things, we will deprecate and eventually remove the old ways. Our aim is to provide a modern, dependable web framework of the highest quality that encourages best practices in all projects that use it. By using incremental improvements, we try to avoid both stagnation and large breaking upgrades.

In this context, stable means:

• All the public APIs (everything in this documentation) will not be moved or renamed without providing backwards-compatible aliases.

• We’ll only break backwards compatibility of these APIs without a deprecation process if a bug or security hole makes it completely unavoidable.

There are a few exceptions to this stability and backwards-compatibility promise.

If we become aware of a security problem – hopefully by someone following our security reporting policy – we’ll do everything necessary to fix it. This might mean breaking backwards compatibility; security trumps the compatibility guarantee.

APIs marked as internal

Certain APIs are explicitly marked as “internal” in a couple of ways:

• Some documentation refers to internals and mentions them as such. If the documentation says that something is internal, we reserve the right to change it.
• Functions, methods, and other objects prefixed by a leading underscore (). This is the standard Python way of indicating that something is private; if any method starts with a single _, it’s an internal API.