API stability

Django promises API stability and forwards-compatibility since version 1.0. Ina nutshell, this means that code you develop against a version of Django willcontinue to work with future releases. You may need to make minor changes whenupgrading the version of Django your project uses: see the “Backwardsincompatible changes” section of the release note forthe version or versions to which you are upgrading.

What “stable” means

In this context, stable means:

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

  • If new features are added to these APIs – which is quite possible –they will not break or change the meaning of existing methods. In otherwords, “stable” does not (necessarily) mean “complete.”

  • If, for some reason, an API declared stable must be removed or replaced, itwill be declared deprecated but will remain in the API for at least twofeature releases. Warnings will be issued when the deprecated method iscalled.

See Official releases for more details on how Django’s versionnumbering scheme works, and how features will be deprecated.

  • We’ll only break backwards compatibility of these APIs if a bug orsecurity hole makes it completely unavoidable.

Stable APIs

In general, everything covered in the documentation – with the exception ofanything in the internals area is considered stable.

Exceptions

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

Security fixes

If we become aware of a security problem – hopefully by someone following oursecurity reporting policy – we’ll doeverything necessary to fix it. This might mean breaking backwardscompatibility; 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 thedocumentation says that something is internal, we reserve the right tochange it.
  • Functions, methods, and other objects prefixed by a leading underscore(). This is the standard Python way of indicating that something isprivate; if any method starts with a single , it’s an internal API.