La classe Paginator

Showing 5,000 rows on one page is slow and overwhelming. Pagination splits a long list into bite-sized pages your users can browse. 📄

Django ships a Paginator class that does the math for you. You hand it a list and a page size, and it carves the data into pages.

Pass your full queryset and how many items per page. Here every page holds 10 articles.

Ask the paginator how many pages exist with num_pages. It rounds up, so 25 items at 10 per page gives 3 pages.

Call get_page() with a page number to fetch a single slice. It returns a Page object holding just those items.

A Page is iterable, so you loop it like a list. You only ever touch the items on that one page, never all 5,000.

If someone passes page 999 or the word "abc", get_page() quietly returns the last or first valid page instead of crashing.

The page knows its own spot. Read number for the current page, handy for highlighting it in your navigation bar.

Use has_next() and has_previous() to decide whether to show the next or back link in your template.

Once you know there is a next page, next_page_number() gives you the number to link to. previous_page_number() does the same backward.

In a view, read the requested page from the query string, then pass the page to your template context.

You have 23 items and a page size of 10. Let's test the math.

You met the Paginator: feed it a queryset and a page size, fetch slices with get_page(), and read num_pages, number, and has_next() to build navigation. 🎉