I got tired of Django being left behind in UI, so I built a shadcn/ui equivalent.

John Joseph Bassey — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 22:48:29 +0000

For years, the React and Next.js ecosystems have had a massive advantage: premium, plug-and-play UI components. Tools like shadcn/ui completely changed how developers build interfaces by offering beautifully styled, accessible components with zero vendor lock-in.

Meanwhile, if you were building a monolith with Django, htmx, and Alpine.js, you were left out in the cold. You either had to wire up custom HTML/CSS from scratch, fight with the complex configurations of heavy runtime libraries, or rely on locked pip packages where changing a simple button color required CSS overrides or forking a repo.

I realized Django didn't need another heavy library. It needed a delivery system.

Enter Djinn UI.

Djinn UI (available now on PyPI) is a CLI-based component registry for Django. It brings the copy-paste ownership model directly to your Python backend.

How it works:
Instead of adding a dependency to your INSTALLED_APPS, you simply run:
djinn add dashboard

Djinn drops the raw, perfectly styled HTML and Tailwind code directly into your templates/ folder. It uses native

{% include %}

tags. No custom syntax to learn, no runtime overhead. It is your code, and you own it completely.

Built for the Agentic Era:
We aren't just catching up to React; we are jumping ahead. Djinn UI is the first Django UI system built with AI in mind. It ships with a built-in MCP server. If you use tools like Cursor, you can simply say, "Build a pricing page using my Djinn components," and watch your AI agent scaffold your UI seamlessly.

Stop wasting weeks building components. Reclaim the power of the monolith.

Try it out: pip install djinn-ui
Check out the pypi package here: https://pypi.org/project/djinn-ui/

DEV Community: John Joseph Bassey

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I got tired of Django being left behind in UI, so I built a shadcn/ui equivalent.

I got tired of Django being left behind in UI, so I built a shadcn/ui equivalent.