A Wagtail demo in your browser
A fully local, on-demand Wagtail demo
It loads and runs all of a demo site’s resources directly in your browser, and it’s here: bakerydemo-webassembly. To try Wagtail, go to the admin dashboard at /admin/, and use username "admin" and password "changeme". Enjoy! ✨
How it works
It really is running everything in your browser, and no data leaves your device. This is possible thanks to the Pyodide project, which runs Python code as WebAssembly directly in a browser web worker. The worker intercepts requests that would normally go to an external server, and processes them directly in the browser instead. Loading Django, Wagtail, and all! And all the data (database, media files, etc) is saved via a virtual filesystem persisted in IndexedDB, another nifty bit of browser tech. Here’s a high-level diagram:
This is all inspired by the work of Adam Zieliński on the WordPress Playground: Client-side WebAssembly WordPress with no server.
Suitability of the demo
It’s excellent for people wanting to learn Wagtail with access to a 'sandbox' website, or to demo new features or experiments. It’s totally unsuitable for anything at a large scale, as it takes a lot of resources to load the whole site in your browser like that, prior to displaying any page. So enjoy as a demo, but not as something for production use! We’d love to hear what use cases people have for tech like this, and whether we should do more with it. Perhaps you can showcase that as a lightning talk at Wagtail Space 2026 in a few weeks?
