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Asked: 2026-05-28T20:37:42+00:00

I am trying to use Django to create a recursive relationship, which gives users

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I am trying to use Django to create a recursive relationship, which gives users a folder-like hierarchical structure in which to place resources.

What would be the best way to achieve this?

I know I could use treebeard or mptt to create a nested set but I have read that making changes to the tree structure (something that would be happening a lot in this case) can be quite an intensive operation as a lot of fields have to be updated.

On the other hand, I could folder model with a ForeignKey to self but how do I manage the top level folders with no foreign key value? Will Django complain if I just set this value to be NULL?

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Treebeard actually supports three different tree implementations, just choose the one that will suite your needs.

    • Adjacency List (fast writes at the cost of slow reads)
    • Materialized Path (probably the fastest way of working with trees in SQL)
    • Nested Sets (very efficient reads at the cost of high maintenance on write/delete operations)

    Docs are here: https://tabo.pe/projects/django-treebeard/docs/tip/

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