Simon Willison’s Weblog

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.

# 17th May 2018, 1:40 pm / open-source, djangocon, django

mendoza-trees-workshop (via) Eventbrite Argentina has an academy program to train new Python/Django developers. I presented a workshop there this morning showing how Django and Jupyter can be used together to iterate on a project. Since the session was primarily about demonstrating Jupyter it was mostly live-coding, but the joy of Jupyter is that at the end of a workshop you can go back and add inline commentary to the notebooks that you used. In putting together the workshop I learned about the django_extensions “/manage.py shell_plus --notebook” command—it’s brilliant! It launches Jupyter in a way that lets you directly import your Django models without having to mess around with DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE.

# 8th May 2018, 5:22 pm / speaking, jupyter, tutorial, django, eventbrite

Describing events in code (via) Phil Gyford built an online directory of every play, movie, gig and exhibition he has been to in the past 38 years using a combination of digital archaeology and saved ticket stubs. He built it using Django and published this piece extensively describing the process he went through to design the data model.

# 28th March 2018, 3:41 pm / orm, django, philgyford

Wagtail 2.0. The leading Django content management system just released it’s 2.0 version—now Django 2.0 and Python 3 only, and with a new rich text editor based on Draft.js. I really like Wagtail—it’s full-feature,d mature, well-documented and philosophically aligned with how I think a CMS should work. I also like this line about the new Python 3 requirement: “Call us reckless neophiles, but we think that, nine years in, Python 3 is looking pretty solid.”

# 1st March 2018, 4:06 pm / django, cms, python3, wagtail

Conditional aggregation in Django 2.0 (via) I hadn’t realised how clever this new Django ORM feature by Tom Forbes is. It lets you build an aggregation against a subset of rows, e.g. Client.objects.aggregate(regular=Count(’pk’, filter=Q(account_type=Client.REGULAR)))—then if you are using PostgreSQL it translates it into a fast FILTER WHERE clause, while other databases emulate the same behaviour using a CASE statement.

# 3rd February 2018, 9:38 pm / postgresql, django

Channels 2.0. Andrew just shipped Channels 2.0—a major rewrite and redesign of the Channels project he started back in 2014. Channels brings async to Django, providing a logical, standardized way of supporting things like WebSockets and asynchronous execution on top of a Django application. Previously it required you to run a separate Twisted server and redis/RabbitMQ queue, but thanks to Python 3 async everything can now be deployed as a single process. And the new ASGI spec means its turtles all the way down! Everything from URL routing to view functions to middleware can be composed together using the same ASGI interface.

# 2nd February 2018, 6:19 pm / async, python3, django, python, andrew-godwin, websockets

Using setup.py in Your (Django) Project. Includes this neat trick: if you list manage.py in the setup(scripts=) argument you can call it from e.g. cron using the full path to manage.py within your virtual environment and it will execute in the correct context without needing to explicitly activate the environment first.

# 2nd February 2018, 12:33 pm / django, python

django-postgres-copy (via) Really neat Django queryset add-on which exposes the PostgreSQL COPY statement for importing (and exporting) CSV data. MyModel.objects.from_csv(“filename.csv”). Built by the team of data journalists at the California Civic Data Coalition.

# 26th January 2018, 12:43 am / csv, postgresql, django

GaretJax/django-click (via) I’ve been using Click to write command-line tools in Python recently (big datasette and csvs-to-sqlite use it) and its a delightful way of composing simple and complex CLI interfaces. I’ve always found Django’s default management command syntax hard to fit in my head—django-click means I can combine the two.

# 19th January 2018, 11:19 pm / django

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.

# 2nd December 2017, 4:49 pm / django

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.

# 19th November 2017, 6:28 am / django

DSF calls for applicants for a Django Fellow. This is a fantastic opportunity: the Django Software Foundation’s fellowship program is providing the opportunity for a new developer to get paid to work on Django 20-40 hours a week. Tim Graham has held this position full-time for the past three years and is looking to scale back to part-time, hence this new opportunity. Applications are due by December 18, 2017.

# 16th November 2017, 10:31 pm / django

django-multitenant (via) Absolutely fascinating Django library for horizontally sharding a database using a multi-tenant pattern, from the team at Citus. In this pattern every relevant table includes a “tenant_id”, and all queries should specifically select against that ID. Once you have that in place, you can shard your rows across multiple different databases and route to the correct database based on the tenant ID, safe in the knowledge that joins will still work provided they are against other rows belonging to the same tenant.

# 16th November 2017, 9:12 pm / scaling, postgresql, django

Squeezing every drop of performance out of a Django app on Heroku. Ben Firshman describes some lesser known tricks for scaling Django on Heroku—in particular, using gunicorn gevent asynchronous workers and setting up PostgreSQL connection pooling using django-db-geventpool.

# 31st October 2017, 2:08 pm / postgresql, heroku, django

arxiv-vanity (via) Beautiful new project from Ben Firshman and Andreas Jansson: “Arxiv Vanity renders academic papers from Arxiv as responsive web pages so you don’t have to squint at a PDF”. It works by pulling the raw LaTeX source code from Arxiv and rendering it to HTML using a heavily customized Pandoc workflow. The real fun is in the architecture: it’s a Django app running on Heroku which fires up on-demand Hyper.sh Docker containers for each individual rendering job.

# 25th October 2017, 8:06 pm / docker, science, ben-firshman, django, pdf

A Brief Intro to Docker for Djangonauts (via) This is great—a really clear introduction to both Docker and Docker Compose, aimed at Django developers. Includes line-by-line annotations of an example Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml.

# 18th October 2017, 9:06 pm / docker, django

My essential django package list. Insightful list of Django packages—many of which I hadn’t seen before—by Serafeim Papastefanos, each with a handy explanation of what it’s useful for and why.

# 11th October 2017, 2:42 pm / django

Generate dynamic titles for /search/ pages. Fun little enhancement to my faceted search implementation: I now generate dynamic titles for each search results page describing the search, e.g. “Blogmarks tagged security in Feb, 2005” or ““python” in quotations tagged ruby, python in 2007”.

# 8th October 2017, 7:47 pm / facetedsearch, django

Building a statistical profiler in python. Generating flame graphs of production Python code is surprisingly straight-forward. Brian Pitts built a statistical flame graph profiler into our tikibar debugging tool at Eventbrite and it’s proved extremely useful.

# 5th October 2017, 3:44 pm / profiling, tikibar, django, python