I have been using Django for 7 years. You don't need node.js / npm. (I never have). If you need more asynchronous processing on the server side then node.js m

I have been using Django for 7 years. You don't need node.js / npm. (I never have). If you need more asynchronous processing on the server side then node.js might be worth looking at (though you will need to do server side programming in JavaScript rather than Python. Python is far more pleasant to work with in my opinion). Django channels however will give you the option of asynchronous server side code (and there are some other options for Python). If you are at the learning stage I would forget about it for the time being.