This tutorial is intended to be a quick ramp-up on CockroachDB with Django. In case you're searching for a proper Django tutorial, this is not it. At the time of writing, django-cockroachdb library is available in two versions, (2 and 3). This tutorial will cover version 3, and is inspired by the Digital Ocean tutorial using Django with PostgreSQL. I am going to highlight the steps where this tutorial differs from the original. For everything else, we will assume the tutorial is followed as is.
I originally wrote this post two years ago and had since updated it as CockroachDB RBAC is no longer an enterprise-only feature so we can skip that step. I'm also including steps to launch a Docker instance to make this more portable and comprehensive.