---
canonical: "https://www.jsolly.com/blog/Adding-spell-check-django-ckeditor/"
title: "Enhance Your Blog: Enable Spell Checking With SCAYT in Django CKEditor"
description: "Learn how to enable spell checking in Django CKEditor with SCAYT. This guide will show you how to improve the editing experience on your website."
author: "John Solly"
published: "2021-12-31T05:36:14.000Z"
updated: "2026-09-07T14:25:05.448Z"
---

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# Enhance Your Blog: Enable Spell Checking With SCAYT in Django CKEditor

![abc with a green checkmark](https://d1d7p8ufhgz4ld.cloudfront.net/media/post_metaimgs/spellcheck.webp)

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## Note

I wrote this post a while ago and am unsure if this still works. The doc links I used to use now throw a 404. Your mileage may vary.

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## Intro

Added an 'All Categories' section to the sidebar and enabled spell checking on [ckeditor](https://ckeditor.com/), a WYSIWYF (What you see is what you get) editor. 

Check out this video about how to enable it in a Django project!

<iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ggPfQfuV7rM" style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;top:0;left:0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" title="Video: Enhance Your Blog: Enable Spell Checking With SCAYT in Django CKEditor" loading="lazy"></iframe>

After scanning through a few Github repos, I came across SCAYT. It's a plugin for django-ckeditor. The installation directions instruct you to clone a repo into the plugins folder, but when I checked that folder, I noticed SCAYT was already there!

Turns out that SCAYT is a plugin that's included by default when you pip install django-ckeditor. I tried finding Youtube videos or guides on how to get it working, but nothing worked for me!

I decided to visit the git repo of django-ckeditor itself and was blessed with great doc on how to do it! All you need do is add CKEDITOR\_CONFIGS to the settings.py file. For some reason, they have since deleted this doc.

After adding this code to my django settings file, I got all this new functionality.

<pre><code class="language-python">CKEDITOR_CONFIGS = {
'default': {'toolbar': 'full'},
}</code></pre>

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## Before

![Create post screen before adding ckeditor](https://d1d7p8ufhgz4ld.cloudfront.net/media/post_imgs/before_add_post.png)

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## After

![Create post view after adding ckeditor](https://d1d7p8ufhgz4ld.cloudfront.net/media/post_imgs/after_add_post.png)

I think there are way too many buttons going on here, but at this point in the website, I am the only one making posts, so I will leave it for now. Plus, it's fun to have so much rich text functionality.

The second problem I ran into is that SCAYT is not enabled by default. You need to click on it and choose 'enable’ start spell checking my posts.

![Disable SCAYT dropdown in ckeditor](https://d1d7p8ufhgz4ld.cloudfront.net/media/post_imgs/disable_scaty.png)

Turns out, there is an option you can set in ckeditor's config.js file which is located in /static/ckeditor/ckeditor/config.js

`config.scayt_autoStartup = true;`

After adding this property to that file, it now enables on-load!

December 31, 2021 in [Web Dev](https://www.jsolly.com/blog/category/web-dev/)

Updated September 7, 2026