A nice feature to have in a social media application is liking. Like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, we’ll allow users here to like a post.

We’ll also add data to count the number of likes a post has received and check whether a current user making the request has liked a post.

We’ll do this in four steps:

  • Add a new posts_liked field to the User model.

  • Write methods on the User model to like and remove a like from a post. We’ll also add a method to check whether the user has liked a post.

  • Add likes_count and has_liked to PostSerializer.

  • Add endpoints to like a post and remove a like from a post.

Great! Let’s start by adding the new fields to the User model.

Adding the posts_liked field to the User model

The posts_liked field will contain all the posts liked by a user. The relationship between the User model and the Post model concerning the “Like” feature can be described as follows:

  • A user can like many posts.

  • A post can be liked by many users.

Does this kind of relationship sound familiar? It is a many-to-many relationship.

Following this change, here’s the updated structure of the table—we are also anticipating the methods we’ll add to the model:

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