What’s New in Django 4.0? Key Features and Installation Guide

The Python web framework Django has officially released version 4.0, focusing on database caching and form customization improvements.

It now includes a new Redis cache backend, allowing developers to use Redis as an in‑memory cache with built‑in support, requiring a local or remote Redis server and Python‑Redis bindings.

Django 4.0 also simplifies customization of Forms, Formsets, and ErrorList, and enables rendering them with the template engine.

The release can be installed via pip: pip install Django==4.0 According to the release notes, the main updates are:

New RedisCache backend provides built‑in support for Redis caching.

Forms, Formsets and ErrorList can now be rendered using the template engine, simplifying customization.

Introduces a new password hashing algorithm scrypt (requires more memory and OpenSSL 1.1+, not enabled by default).

The Python standard library’s zoneinfo module is now the default timezone implementation in Django.

Adds functional unique constraints.

jQuery upgraded from 3.5.1 to 3.6.0.

admindocs now displays cached attributes for models.

PostgreSQL backend now supports connections via service name and drops support for PostgreSQL 9.6.

Django test runner adds a --shuffle option to run tests in random order.

The previous version, Django 3.0, introduced asynchronous support for Python about a year ago.