Django: application domain causes invalid hyperlinks generation - django

My django app is accessible under somedomain.com/myappname and that causes lots of trouble. Most of them can be bypassed somehow, but when I found out that I can't access objects managing pages with hyperlinks generated by admin panel (since they should be available under somedomain.com/myappname/admin/etcetc and app generates hyperlinks like somedomain.com/admin/etcetc), I started wondering how to make application understand that its base address is not somedomain.com but somedomain.com/myappname. Is there some config variable I need to set up or anything? Well, the easiest way is to change domain to myappname.somedomain.com, but if only I could do that.

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Spartacus integration with CDS, profile.consent.given cookie not being set after clearing site data

We're integrating SAP Commerce 2005 and Spartacus 2.0.3 with CDS (Context-Driven Services). We followed the instructions from https://sap.github.io/spartacus-docs/cds-integration/ and we got it work right.
Nevertheless, we've noticed one issue.
When we clear the site data (either from Chrome DevTool or via browser Settings), the cookie named profile.consent.given is not being set anew while refreshing the page - even though the PROFILE consent has consentState "GIVEN" in local storage in spartacus-local-data > anonymous-consents > consents.
Initially I thought that it's just not visible in DevTools, but when I've added the url parameter ?profileTagDebug=true, in the console there is a log saying:
"[Profile Tag] No cookie found with name profile.consent.given".
When I set this cookie manually with value true, everything starts to work just fine, all other needed cookies and local storage data responsible for tracking users behavior is being set properly.
Do you see any place where we could have done something wrong, which may have caused this cookie to work improperly? Which module or component of Spartacus library would be of any clue in resolving this issue?
Edit: the reason of this strange behavior was in profile tag created by our team in CDS. It contained:
"consentListener": "type":"cookie","cookieName":"profile.consent.given","cookieValue":"true"},
which made the cookie profile.consent.given necessary while it shouldn't be. Using profile tag without this part made all work just fine.
With Spartacus, this cookie doesn’t make sense anymore. It is created by the Commerce backend and works best in combination with an accelerator frontend. Cds-spartacus in combination with ProfileTag relies on the anonymous consents or the user consents (depending on the user being logged in or not) loaded by Spartacus. More information about anonymous consents can be found here: https://sap.github.io/spartacus-docs/anonymous-consent/.
Just a quick FYI about the CDS-Spartacus integration: the profile tag script is pulled from the configured URL by Spartacus, and the script is doing all the event and data "scraping". The cookie is also being placed in the browser by the script.
Your question and this comment lead me to think that the script is not handling this case.
I'm not even sure if it should handle it, so it might be a better idea to contact CDS team directly about this one.

How to setup groups (sub-sites) in Django

I'm new to Django and I come from Drupal family. There we have Organic Groups with which we can create groups of content and subsites; how do I do something like that with Django?
Say I'm making this site for my company using Django and every department in my company needs a private section on the site. For example, the design people have their own part of the website into which the back-end developers can not come in. And the back-end developers will have the same thing too.
I want to build the site in such a way that I just login into Django admin and add a new category or subsite or group (whatever the Django term is) with the same settings from other groups or with similar settings.
It depends on what you mean by "private section". You should probably try looking at it from a different angle:
Django splits a site's functionality by means of "apps". Each app does its specific thing, and gets a set of tables in the database. Apps can access each others' tables. For example, it's common for other apps to access the Auth app's user, group, and permissions tables. Is this what you mean by "sub sites"?
As for access control, users can be assigned to groups and they can have various administrative permissions assigned to them. Add, change, and delete permissions are automatically generated for each model (i.e. database table). You can also add your own permissions.
I don't think you'll be able to separate the designers from the back-end developers at the Django level. You'll need to do something else, such as maintain separate source repositories for each and merge them to create the usable site (each group would have read-only access to the other). It really depends on your teams' discipline, because these elements can get intertwined.
Django recommends that static files be served by something else, say directly from your web server, or from another machine with a simple HTTP server (no CGI/WSGI/whatever). This is because Django can only slow down static files compared to direct service. However, for testing, ther is a static page server you can enable.
Given all that, static files usually amount to CSS, images, media, and JavaScript. Of these, the back-end people might want to mess with the JS, but that's it, so this could be in the designers' repo.
The Django tree itself has the code for the site and the apps. It's almost all back end stuff. The exception is the HTML template files, located in the "templates" directory in each app. These are the files that are filled in with the context data supplied by the back-end view code. I have no idea if this is front or back end for you guys; it could be mostly back end if there's a lot of CSS discipline, but I think that's unlikely.
There are a lot of things that you can do in Django that make life easier for one side or the other. For example, template tags allow custom Python code to generate HTML to insert into the page. I use these to generate tab bars and panes, for example.
I really can't help much more without getting a better picture of what your needs are. The question is still vague. You're probably best off taking a day or two going through the tutorial, seeing what the Django perspective is, and then working out how (or if!) it fits into your needs.

How do I make Django figure out which Site object to use based on "Host" header in the HTTP request?

Consider a Django app built to serve multiple sites with slightly differing content using the standard Django sitesframework.
The traditional way to host this would be to configure multiple Site objects and setup the app in multiple Django projects with each project pointing to a different SITE_ID in their respective settings.py:s.
For various reasons I'd like to avoid having to create a new project for each new site. I want to be able to setup one project and have Django figure out which Site object to use based on the hostname referenced in the incoming HTTP request.
What is the recommended way to achieve this functionality?
Clarification: I want the site framework to ignore settings.SITE_ID (which is hard-coded in settings.py) and instead dynamically fetch Site objects based on what is in the Host header. Why this requirement? I'll be adding and removing sites multiple times per hour and the total amount of sites will exceed 10,000, so setting up a Django project for each site is not an option. Is this a problem that is solvable in Django? If so, what is the best way to achieve it?
The recommended way is to not attempt it at all, since settings should never change at runtime. Instead, set a variable in your virtual host configuration and have the WSGI adapter script or settings module pick one of the sites based on that.

How to host 50 domains/sites with common Django code base

I have 50 different websites that use the same layout and code base, but mostly non-overlapping data (regional support sites, not link farm). Is there a way to have a single installation of the code and run all 50 at the same time?
When I have a bug to fix (or deploy new feature), I want to deploy ONE time + 1 restart and be done with it.
Also:
Code needs to know what domain the request is coming to so the appropriate data is displayed.
The Sites framework comes to mind.
Apart from that we have Django running for multiple sites by symlinking Django to various docroots. Works like a charm, too.
I can see two quite distinct ways to do this:
Use one database and the sites framework. Every post/picture/whatever model is connected to a Site and you always filter on Site. This requires a separate settings file for every database.
Use one database for each and every site. This allows different users for every site, but requires duplication of everything that is stored in the database. It also requires a separate settings file pointing to the correct database.
Either way, you do not duplicate any code, only data.
--
If you need to do site-specific, or post-specific changes to ie. a template, you should read up on how Django loads templates. It allows you to specify a list, ie ["story_%d.html", "story_site_%d.html", "story.html"] and django will look for the templates in that order.
I just ran into this and ended up using a custom middleware class that:
Fetch the HTTP_HOST
Clean the HTTP_HOST (remove www, ports, etc.)
Look up domain in a Website table that's tied to each account.
Set the account instance on the HTTPRequest object.
The throughout my view code I do lookups based on the account stored in the HTTPRequest objects.
Hope that helps someone in the future.

How to configure server for small hosting company for django-powered flash sites?

I'm looking at setting up a small company that hosts flash-based websites for artist portfolios. The customer control panel would be django-powered, and would provide the interface for uploading their images, managing galleries, selling prints, etc.
Seeing as the majority of traffic to the hosted sites would end up at their top level domain, this would result in only static media hits (the HTML page with the embedded flash movie), I could set up lighttpd or nginx to handle those requests, and pass the django stuff back to apache/mod_whatever.
Seems as if I could set this all up on one box, with the django sites framework keeping each site's admin separate.
I'm not much of a server admin. Are there any gotchas I'm not seeing?
Maybe. I don't think the built-in admin interface is really designed to corral admins into their own sites. The sites framework is more suited to publish the same content on multiple sites, not to constrain users to one site or another. You'd be better off writing your own admin interface that enforces those separations.
As far as serving content goes, it seems like you could serve up a common (static) Flash file that uses a dynamic XML file to fill in content. If you use Django to generate the XML, that would give you the dynamic content you need.
This django snippet might be what you need to keep them seperate:
http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/1054/
"A very simple multiple user blog model with an admin interface configured to only allow people to edit or delete entries that they have created themselves, unless they are a super user."
Depending on the amount of sites you're going to host it might be easier to write a single Django app once, with admin, and to create a separate Django project for each new site. This is simple, it works for sure AND as an added bonus you can add features to newer sites without running the risk of causing problems in older sites.
Then again, it might be handier to customize the admin such that you limit the amount of objects users can see to those on the given site itself. This is fairly easy to do, allthough you might want to use RequestSite instead of the usual Site from the sites framework as that requires separate settings for each site.
There exists this one method in the ModelAdmin which you can override to have manual control over the objects being edited.