Django tutorials everywhere use constant-set application name all around - in urls file, in HTML templates, in views. But if I want to distribute an application and let the user sets it name (i.e. its URL postfix on http://server.com/appname) - how can I do?
I must have some common name setting then in configuration, but how to work it for template files, etc?
The only thing that matters with reference to the URL is the app's urlconf. As long as you do your imports via the app's package, e.g. appname.models, appname.views, etc., all consumers of your app will have to do after installation is add it to their INSTALLED_APPS and include() it in their urlconf. Everything else will be found by Django provided they are in their default locations.
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In the Django documentation, a line reads:
New applications should avoid default_app_config. Instead they should require the dotted path to the appropriate AppConfig subclass to be configured explicitly in INSTALLED_APPS.
This suggests I should require users of my app (let's call it sports) to use the following string in their INSTALLED_APPS list:
"sports.apps.SportsConfig"
However, all of the Django apps I use (django-rest-framework, django-cors-headers, django-celery-results) use default_app_config and only require me to specify the first part of the string (in my case "sports").
So how should I write my app? (1) Follow the advice in the docs and force users to write the entire string "sports.apps.SportsConfig" or (2) Follow what all of the other apps in the Django universe are doing and allow users to write only the first part of the string "sports".
I think it completely depends if you want to override custom default values of Class AppConfig for your app.
My Opinion: It's better to create CustomAppConfig (for eg. sports.apps.SportsConfig) by inheriting from Class AppConfig only for apps you create in your Django projects. Because you can tune different parameters like name, label, a verbose_name for admin panel.
Almost every video which I saw about Django (for beginners), people who create applications using the startapp command and add their urls.py file manually in their application. My question is, if urls.py is so important for views and for our app why it's not creating automatically when we run startapp command!
Not every app directly serves the end user
URLs.py is only useful for routing users to pages which primarily have to do with that app. However, many apps may only do internal things. I have an app in one of my projects that handles badges and rewards, but there is no page which corresponds to any of that because it all shows exclusively as part of the profile pages (and the routing is handled within the profile app).
It just isn't always needed and that is why it is not always included.
Simply you don't have to serve each of your app to the end-users. You may have apps responsible for only your inner interactions. So it is not logical to put urls.py in each and every app.
It vary on how you use your routing.
django give project wide urls.py by default when you create the project using django-admin startproject command. so you can create all your project's urls on this file.
And not all app intended to server user directly using urls.
Whether i also prefer to create separate urls.py and api-urls.py routers for every app and include in main urls.py
I am curious if it is possible to hide sphinx documentation inside a django app so that only people who log in can see it. It seems to me that since sphinx creates its own structure and that Django uses the urlconf to define which pages a user can see, that it wouldn't be possible to combine the two. Although there must be some combining since the Django website likely uses django and sphinx. I am wondering if anyone has any insight or if they can point me in the right direction.
Thank You in Advance!
Sphinx builds your docs into HTML files, so in most cases this docs should be served by your web server rather then Django. However Django is able to serve static files as well.
You can use the django.views.static.serve function to do this and wrap this function with login_required. E.g:
from django.views.static import serve
from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required
urlpatterns += patterns('',
url(r'^docs/(?P<path>.*)', login_required(serve), {'document_root': '/path/to/sphinx/build/html'}, 'docs'),
)
However this configuration will be considered a bad practice in production environment as in this case Django will serve both html and css/js files from your sphinx theme.
The first improvement you can do here is to serve /path/to/sphinx/build/html/_static/ with apache/nginx or whatever you use.
The more proper way is to serve docs with apache/nginx and make it handle the auth itself. Unfortunately I made a quick Google search but did not find a way to use Django's User model to handle http_auth in apache or other. Alternatively you can use something like mod_sendfile or X-Accel modules - http://www.wellfireinteractive.com/blog/nginx-django-x-accel-redirects/ In a nutshell - Django app checks permission if user can view the file and add special header to response containing file path. Webserver will serve this file instead of original message from django
I have a vague idea on how to solve this, but really need a push :)
I have a Django app running with apache (mod_wsgi). Today urls look like this:
http://site.com/category/A/product/B/
What I would like to do is this:
http://A.site.com/product/B
This means that the url dispatcher some how needs to pick up the value found in the subdomain and understand the context of this instead of only looking at the path. I see two approaches:
Use .htaccess and rewrites so that a.site.com is a rewrite. Not sure if this does the trick since I don't fully understand what the django url dispatcher framework will see in that case?
Understanding how the url dispatcher DO work I could write a filter that looks at valid sub domains and provides this in a rewritten format to the url dispatcher code.
Any hints or solutions are very much appreciated! Thanks.
Have you looked at django.contrib.sites? I think a combination of that, setting SITE_ID in your settings.py, and having one WSGI file per "site" can take care of things.
EDIT: -v set.
django.contrib.sites is meant to let you run multiple sites from the same Django project and database. It adds a table (django.contrib.sites.models.Site) that has domain and name fields. From what I can tell, the name can mean whatever you want it to, but it's usually the English name for the site. The domain is what should show up in the host part of the URL.
SITE_ID is set in settings.py to the id of the site being served. In the initial settings.py file, it is set to 1 (with no comments). You can replace this with whatever code you need to set it to the right value.
The obvious thing to do would be to check an environment variable, and look up that in the name or domain field in the Site table, but I'm not sure that will work from within the settings.py file, since that file sets up the database connection parameters (circular dependency?). So you'll probably have to settle for something like:
SITE_ID = int(os.environ.get('SITE_ID', 1)
Then in your WSGI file, you do something like:
os.environ['SITE_ID'] = 2
and set that last number to the appropriate value. You'll need one WSGI file per site, or maybe there's a way to set SITE_ID from within the Apache setup. Which path to choose depends on the site setup in question.
The sites framework is most powerful where you use Site as the target of a ForeignKey or ManyToManyField so that you can link your model instances (i.e. records) to specific sites.
Mikes solution is correct if you want to have multiple sites with same apps with different content (sites module) on multiple domains or subdomains, but it has a drawback that you need to be running multiple instances of the Django process.
A better solution for the main problem about multiple domains or subdomains is to use a simple middleware that handles incoming requests with the process_request() function and changing the documented urlconf attribute (link) of the request object to the URLconf you want to use.
More details and an example of the per-request or per-domain URL dispatcher can be found at:
http://gw.tnode.com/0483-Django/
Try adding a wildcard subdomain: usually *.
Please advice whether is it correct method to change the urlconf and templatedir variables of a django settings file dynamically within a custom middleware function based on the site requested.
No. I don't know why you would want to do this. If you have multiple sites, the correct way to serve them is with multiple WSGI instances, each pointing at separate settings.py and urls.py files.
Edit after comment: This has nothing to do with the sites framework, which is completely optional. As I say, if you want to serve multiple sites, use multiple .wsgi scripts each pointing to a separate urls.py and settings.py. All the rest of the code can be the same.