django-admin-audit

django-admin-audit is a reusable Django application that records actions in the Django admin along with request metadata (IP address, headers, user agent, and more). It plugs into Django's built-in admin logging so you can enrich existing audit trails without modifying your admin classes.

Features

• Stores a normalized audit log for each admin action with optional request metadata.
• Middleware-based request capture that supports IP anonymisation and header whitelisting.
• Extensible hook for supplying extra JSON-serialisable context per action.
• Ships with Django admin integration so logs are browsable immediately.
• Superuser-only undo action that can revert additions, changes, and deletions when snapshots are available.

Installation

pip install django-admin-action-audit

Then add the app and middleware to your Django settings:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ...
    "django_admin_audit",
]

MIDDLEWARE = [
    # ...
    "django_admin_audit.middleware.AdminAuditMiddleware",
]

Configuration

Customise the behaviour via the following optional settings (prefixed with ADMIN_AUDIT_):

Reverting admin actions

django-admin-audit records before/after snapshots for admin activity so that superusers can undo selected log entries from the Admin Audit Log changelist. The undo admin action honours the following rules:

• Additions: removes the newly created object.
• Changes: restores previously persisted field values.
• Deletions: recreates the deleted object using the stored snapshot.

Snapshots are captured automatically for models managed through the Django admin while the audit middleware is active. If a snapshot is incomplete (for example, the object was already gone before the request), the entry is marked as non-revertible.

Providing extra context

Create a callable that accepts the LogEntry instance and returns a dictionary. The dictionary is stored in the extra JSON field.

# myproject/audit.py
def admin_extra_context(log_entry):
    return {"session_key": getattr(log_entry.user, "last_login_session", None)}

# settings.py
ADMIN_AUDIT_EXTRA_CONTEXT_CALLABLE = "myproject.audit.admin_extra_context"

Database migrations

This package ships with migrations. Run them after installation:

python manage.py migrate django_admin_audit

Running the tests

The test suite uses pytest and pytest-django:

pip install -e .[test]
pytest

Releasing

1. Update django_admin_audit/__init__.py with the new version.
2. Build the distribution: python -m build.
3. Upload to TestPyPI first, then PyPI via twine upload.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.