Integrate django-vite for HMR and improved static change workflow

[AyushDharDubey]

Closes #70

This PR integrates django-vite to streamline the frontend development workflow and enable hot module reloading for static assets during development.

• Adds django-vite to bridge Django templates with the Vite dev server
• Enables HMR-assisted reloading for JS/CSS/static changes during development
• Removes the need to manually run npm run build for every frontend change in dev
• Moved the static_src/public folder contents into static_src/public/mainapp: to change outDir to public for consistency with django-vite.

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New workflow

Development

1. Start the Vite dev server:

   npm run dev

   • Runs Vite on http://localhost:5173
   • Watches mainapp/static_src/
   • Automatically reloads the whole vite+django setup on change using django-vite

2. Start Django:

   python manage.py runserver

Frontend changes now propagate automatically without rebuilding or restarting Django.

---

Production

Unchanged and explicit:

npm run build
python manage.py collectstatic

• Vite outputs bundled assets
• Django serves static files as usual

---

• No runtime impact in production
• HMR is enabled only when DEBUG=True
• Existing static paths remain compatible

[AyushDharDubey]

I am planning to reorganize the README to break the setup steps and contributing guidelines in a future PR.

I will also document the above steps therein in the same PR.

[lonvia]

Would it somehow possible to integrate running the vite dev server into manage.py runserver? What I mean is: when calling 'runserver', it starts the dev server in the back and also automatically kills it when exiting.

[AyushDharDubey]

I did research into this after our discussion months back... unfortunately django doesn't feature in itself a reimplementation of runsrever, but we have an npm package in the same use case: concurrently

If we implement this, we will be running something like npm run dev:start to start both of the servers at once, it can also label the logs from vite and django separately. We will have to do a bit restructuring of the project: move the whole node package into root of the project....

I did not implement this one because it didn't felt much of a required use case... also, it will wrap our predominantly django project into an npm start command🙃

[lonvia]

I agree, that's definitely not what we'd want.

I was more hoping that runserver could be extended to span a subprocess, which gets automatically SIGHUPed when stopping the runserver process. If that's not easily possible, don't worry about it. I can use a shell script to simulate the behaviour. (Background: I don't do development with 3dmr, just occasionally spin it up to test a PR. And every time I do that, I have forgotten how "spinning up" works. So I prefer to have script or Makefile lying around that reminds me about the steps. But that's all a problem of my setup and doesn't need solving globally.)