The first version of Django was released about 10 years before Python standardized its type hints syntax. Because of this it’s not surprising that getting type hints to work in your Django project is not going to be trivial.

django-stubs with mypy

If you want your Django codebase to be type checked then django-stubs is the go to package to use. It ships both type-stubs for most of Django’s public APIs as well as a mypy plugin that fills in the typing information for all the dynamic black magic that we love Django for. You’ll also want to include the monkeypatch from django-stubs-ext for best results.

This works but it’s kinda slow. mypy on its own isn’t that fast but paired with django-stubs that loads your app to fill in the dynamic bits makes the experience even more sluggish - especially if you have a somewhat larger Django application. Yes, there is mypy daemon that offsets some of this slowness but in my experience it’s not fast enough to comfortably use in your code editor.

I usually put mypy with django-stubs in the CI to run in parallel with tests.

pyright, ty, pyrefly

If you prefer speed over completeness then using any of the newer type-checkers is the way to go. Unfortunately, none of them support django-stubs’ mypy plugin so you will always get false positive errors.

Most commonly you’ll see:

error[unresolved-attribute]: Object of type `User` has no attribute `id`
   --> config/model.py:359:43
    |
359 |             changes={"ignored_by": [None, current_user.id]},
    |                                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
360 |             actor=current_user,
361 |             timestamp=now,

You’ll get errors everywhere dynamic Django properties like the id field or related relationship names are used. This will likely be all over your codebase.

Some of these tools (looking at you ty) currently don’t work well with django-stubs. django-types can help in these cases. It’s a fork of django-stubs without the mypy plugin.

The django-types solution for the id and related names errors is to explicitly define them on the model. As an example:

class User(models.Model):
    id = models.AutoField(primary_key=True)
    # OR
    id: int

Alternatively, using current_user.pk usually doesn’t show up as a type error so I default to using that.

I run pyright in my code editor and have learned to ignore some of the false positives it underlines. I don’t use these faster tools in CI, because it’s almost impossible to get the errors down to zero. I hope that at some point we’ll be able to switch because mypy checks your codebase in minutes, but ty and friends finish in seconds!

A separate codebase for type stubs

One caveat of using django-stubs or django-types is that they lag behind Django versions. At the time of writing this post Django 6.0 has been out for almost 3 months but neither has released full support for the new version, django-stubs is getting close!

Not a huge issue because in the worst case you can sprinkle some type ignore comments and still upgrade.

Aside with Django-Mantle

One way to avoid issues with dynamic Django types is to not use dynamic types at all. With Django-Mantle you define attrs classes and then use helper functions to populate them. From the docs:

from django.db import models

from attrs import define
from mantle import Query


class Bookmark(models.Model):
    url = models.URLField(max_length=500)
    comment = models.TextField()
    favourite = models.BooleanField(default=False)


@define
class BookmarkAttrs:
    url: str
    comment: str
    favourite: bool

rows = Query(Bookmark.objects.all(), BookmarkAttrs).all()
# reveal_type(rows)  # list[BookmarkAttrs]

row = Query(Bookmark.objects.filter(favourite=True), BookmarkAttrs).get()
# reveal_type(row)   # BookmarkAttrs

Now as long as your business logic always deals with your BookmarkAttrs instead of the underlying Django Model you should have no issues with types!

Django Mantle hasn’t been around long (first release Sep 26, 2025), and I have yet to use it, but the idea resonates with me. Here is a video of Carlton explaining the motivation behind it, it’s worth the watch!

Types in Django itself?

6 years ago, Django made the decision to not allow types in the Django codebase. I think the decision made sense at the time - it took until Python 3.14 to finally resolve the long running debacle around deferred evaluation of annotations! But since then web frameworks like FastAPI have shown how to use runtime type information for a better user experience (hint, if you want a similar experience in Django, check out django-ninja) and Django’s wheels have also started to turn!

The Django steering council has accepted the proposal to add types to Django last year! With a little luck we’ll see progress this year (maybe through Google Summer of Code?).

It’s going to be a tough job especially if we’ll want to avoid the mypy plugin pitfall. There is some hopeful news on this front as well: a proposal to add more powerful type syntax and utilities to Python itself (PEP-0827). If accepted, the dynamic parts in Django could be typed without the need for a mypy plugin!

Fin

Typing in Django will be interesting to watch. I hope this post ages poorly and I’ll have to write an update to it soon! 🤞