Building a Full-Stack Social Media Platform with React, Django REST Framework & PostgreSQL
Building projects from tutorials is useful, but the real learning starts when you have to connect multiple systems together and make them behave like one application.
That was the idea behind Pulse, a full-stack social media platform I built using React, Django REST Framework and PostgreSQL.
The goal wasn't just to create a social media UI. I wanted to understand what happens behind the interface — authentication, API design, database communication, media storage, token management and deployment.
🚀 What I Wanted to Build
I wanted Pulse to support the core functionality you'd expect from a modern social platform:
- User registration and login
- JWT-based authentication
- User profiles
- Creating posts
- Image uploads
- Likes and comments
- Search and filtering
- Responsive frontend
- A REST API connecting the frontend and backend
The result became a project that taught me much more about full-stack architecture than I expected.
🧰 The Technology Stack
The project is divided into a React frontend and a Django REST Framework backend.
Frontend
- React 19
- Vite
- React Router
- Axios
- Tailwind CSS
- Framer Motion
- Lucide React
Backend
- Django
- Django REST Framework
- Simple JWT authentication
- Django Filter
- PostgreSQL
Infrastructure
- Neon PostgreSQL
- Cloudinary
- Vercel
- Render
The frontend is deployed separately from the backend, which helped me understand how a real frontend-to-API architecture works.
🏗️ The Architecture
The basic architecture looks like this:
text
React Frontend
│
Axios Requests
│
JWT Tokens
│
▼
Django REST Framework
│
┌──────────┼──────────┐
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
PostgreSQL Cloudinary Authentication
(Neon) Storage
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