32 posts tagged “django-admin”
2025
Smoke test your Django admin site.
Justin Duke demonstrates a neat pattern for running simple tests against your internal Django admin site: introspect every admin route via django.urls.get_resolver() and loop through them with @pytest.mark.parametrize to check they all return a 200 HTTP status code.
This catches simple mistakes with the admin configuration that trigger exceptions that might otherwise go undetected.
I rarely write automated tests against my own admin sites and often feel guilty about it. I wrote some notes on testing it with pytest-django fixtures a few years ago.
2024
My approach to running a link blog
I started running a basic link blog on this domain back in November 2003—publishing links (which I called “blogmarks”) with a title, URL, short snippet of commentary and a “via” link where appropriate.
[... 1,510 words]nanodjango. Richard Terry demonstrated this in a lightning talk at DjangoCon US today. It's the latest in a long line of attempts to get Django to work with a single file (I had a go at this problem 15 years ago with djng) but this one is really compelling.
I tried nanodjango out just now and it works exactly as advertised. First install it like this:
pip install nanodjango
Create a counter.py file:
from django.db import models from nanodjango import Django app = Django() @app.admin # Registers with the Django admin class CountLog(models.Model): timestamp = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True) @app.route("/") def count(request): CountLog.objects.create() return f"<p>Number of page loads: {CountLog.objects.count()}</p>"
Then run it like this (it will run migrations and create a superuser as part of that first run):
nanodjango run counter.py
That's it! This gave me a fully configured Django application with models, migrations, the Django Admin configured and a bunch of other goodies such as Django Ninja for API endpoints.
Here's the full documentation.
django-http-debug, a new Django app mostly written by Claude
Yesterday I finally developed something I’ve been casually thinking about building for a long time: django-http-debug. It’s a reusable Django app—something you can pip install into any Django project—which provides tools for quickly setting up a URL that returns a canned HTTP response and logs the full details of any incoming request to a database table.
2021
Weeknotes: Vaccinate The States, and how I learned that returning dozens of MB of JSON works just fine these days
On Friday VaccinateCA grew in scope, a lot: we launched a new website called Vaccinate The States. Patrick McKenzie wrote more about the project here—the short version is that we’re building the most comprehensive possible dataset of vaccine availability in the USA, using a combination of data collation, online research and continuing to make a huge number of phone calls.
[... 1,109 words]Porting VaccinateCA to Django
As I mentioned back in February, I’ve been working with the VaccinateCA project to try to bring the pandemic to an end a little earlier by helping gather as accurate a model as possible of where the Covid vaccine is available in California and how people can get it.
[... 2,157 words]Weeknotes: Datasette and Git scraping at NICAR, VaccinateCA
This week I virtually attended the NICAR data journalism conference and made a ton of progress on the Django backend for VaccinateCA (see last week).
[... 773 words]The simplest possible call queue
Today I’ve been working on the queue calling mechanism for the new Django backend.
[... 471 words]Django admin customization, JSON in our PostgreSQL
My progress slowed a bit today as I started digging into some things I’m less familiar with—but I’ve found some tricks that I think will help us out a lot.
[... 1,089 words]Importing data from Airtable into Django, plus a search engine for all our code
I made a bunch of progress on the Django backend prototype-that-soon-won’t-be-a-prototype today.
[... 935 words]Spinning up a new Django app to act as a backend for VaccinateCA
My goal by the end of this week is to have a working proof of concept for a Django + PostgreSQL app that can replace Airtable as the principle backend for the https://www.vaccinateca.com/ site. This proof of concept will allow us to make a go or no-go decision and figure out what else needs to be implemented before we can start using it to track calls.
[... 762 words]2020
PostgreSQL full-text search in the Django Admin. Today I figured out how to use PostgreSQL full-text search in the Django admin for my blog, using the get_search_results method on a subclass of ModelAdmin.
2018
Optimizing Django Admin Paginator. The Django admin paginator uses a count(*) to calculate the total number of rows, so it knows how many pages to display. This makes it unpleasantly slow over large datasets. Haki Benita has an ingenious solution: drop in a custom paginator which uses the PostgreSQL “SET LOCAL statement_timeout TO 200” statement first, then if a timeout error is raised returns 9999999999 as the count instead. This means small tables get accurate page counts and giant tables load display in the admin within a reasonable time period.
Django #8936: Add view (read-only) permission to admin (closed). Opened 10 years ago. Closed 15 hours ago. I apparently filed this issue during the first DjangoCon back in September 2008, when Adrian and Jacob mentioned on-stage that they would like to see a read-only permission for the Django Admin. Thanks to Olivier Dalang from Fiji and Petr Dlouhý from Prague it’s going to be a feature shipping in Django 2.1. Open source is a beautiful thing.
2017
Django 2.0 released. The first version of Django to drop support for Python 2. I’ve been running the RC on my blog for the past 5 weeks and greatly enjoying the new mobile-optimized Django admin for posting links and quotations from my phone. The new simplified URL routing syntax (an optional alternative to regular expressions) is a very welcome improvement.
pythondotorg/admin.py (via) There are some neat tricks in the Django application that powers Python.org (built a few years ago by RevSys). Here’s how their admin app handles creator/last_modified_by user relationships.
Using “import refs” to iteratively import data into Django
I’ve been writing a few scripts to backfill my blog with content I originally posted elsewhere. So far I’ve imported answers I posted on Quora (background), answers I posted on Ask MetaFilter and content I recovered from the Internet Archive.
[... 559 words]2010
What’s new in Django 1.2 alpha 1 (via) Multiple database support, improved CSRF prevention, a messages framework (similar to the Rails “flash” feature), model validation, custom e-mail backends, template caching for much faster handling of the include and extends tags, read only fields in the admin, a better if tag and more. Very exciting release.
2009
Django 1.1 release notes (via) Django 1.1 is out! Congratulations everyone who worked on this, it’s a fantastic release. New features include aggregate support in the ORM, proxy models, deferred fields and some really nice admin improvements. Oh, and the testing framework is now up to 10 times thanks to smart use of transactions.
2008
django-batchadmin (via) Seriously classy reusable Django app that adds batch editing (multiple delete by default, with hooks to add your own custom batch actions) to the Django admin changelist screen, using best practice techniques of sub-classing ModelAdmin and hence requiring no patches to Django core itself.
Django snippets: Orderable inlines using drag and drop with jQuery UI. Code example from my PyCon tutorial on customising the Django admin interface.
Django: Security fix released. The Django admin used to save partially-submitted forms if your session expired, and continue the submission when you logged in. It turns out that’s actually an unblockable CSRF exploit and is hence broken as designed, so it’s now been removed. Thanks Ed Eliot and other GCap colleagues for helping me flesh out the potential attack.
Changeset 8266—Added ModelAdmin.save_model() and ModelAdmin.save_formset() methods. One of those small changes that opens up enormous possibilities—it’s now incredibly easy to customise exactly how a model is saved in the Django admin interface by over-riding the save_model method.
Django 1.0 alpha release notes. The big features are newforms-admin, unicode everywhere, the queryset-refactor ORM improvements and auto-escaping in templates.
newforms-admin branch has been merged into trunk. Congrats to Brian Rosner for the merge. django.newforms has been renamed to django.forms as well—1.0 grows ever closer.
Django: security fix released. XSS hole in the Admin application’s login page—updates and patches are available for trunk, 0.96, 0.95 and 0.91.
Django admin OmniGraffle stencil. Alex Lee put together a beautiful stencil for OmniGraffle containing all of the common UI elements seen in the Django admin interface, as a tool for wireframing.
Filtering foreign key choices in newforms-admin. A nice introduction to the Django newform-admin branch, including an example of how to easily implement row-level permissions.
This Week in Django podcast. Michael Trier’s been doing a really fantastic job putting together a Django podcast. The most recent episode (number 4) includes an update on the newforms-admin branch and a couple of handy tips.
2007
Django on the iPhone. Jacob got it working. The next image in his photostream shows the Django admin application querying his phone’s local database of calls.