django-asyntai-ai-chatbot

Adds the Asyntai AI chat assistant to a Django site. The assistant answers visitor questions from your own content, day and night, in more than 80 languages.

Free and open source. Works on every Asyntai plan, including the free plan.

• Requires Django 4.2 or newer and Python 3.10 or newer
• Documentation: https://asyntai.com/documentation/integrations/django/

Install

pip install django-asyntai-ai-chatbot

Add the app to INSTALLED_APPS:

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

Add the middleware at the end of MIDDLEWARE:

MIDDLEWARE = [
    # ...
    "django_asyntai.middleware.AsyntaiWidgetMiddleware",
]

Put your widget ID in your settings file:

ASYNTAI_WIDGET_ID = "asyntai_ab12cd34"

You get the ID from the Install page of your Asyntai dashboard. You can paste the whole snippet; the package keeps only the ID.

That is all. The chat button appears on every page of the site. No template edit and no migration.

Settings

ASYNTAI_WIDGET_ID = "asyntai_ab12cd34"          # required; empty switches the chat off
ASYNTAI_SHOW_TO_ANONYMOUS_ONLY = False           # optional; hide the chat from signed-in users
ASYNTAI_SKIP_PREFIXES = ["/admin/"]              # optional; paths the widget never touches
ASYNTAI_SCRIPT_URL = "https://widget.asyntai.com/static/js/chat-widget.js"  # optional

The values are read on every request, so you can keep the ID in an environment variable:

import os
ASYNTAI_WIDGET_ID = os.environ.get("ASYNTAI_WIDGET_ID", "")

Set ASYNTAI_SKIP_PREFIXES when your admin lives somewhere other than /admin/. Change ASYNTAI_SCRIPT_URL only if Asyntai support asks you to.

Placing the widget by hand

Leave the middleware out and put the tag where you want it instead:

{% load asyntai %}
...
{% asyntai_widget %}
</body>

The tag needs the request in the template context, which Django's default django.template.context_processors.request provides. The tag and the middleware never both fire, so it is safe to keep both.

GZipMiddleware

If you use GZipMiddleware, list AsyntaiWidgetMiddleware below it, so the widget goes into the page before the page is compressed. manage.py check warns you when the order is wrong.

How it works

The middleware inserts a small script just before the closing body tag of every HTML page. That script waits for the page to finish loading, then fetches the chat widget from Asyntai, so your site draws first and page speed is unchanged.

The widget ID and the script address travel to the browser on a data attribute, never inside the script. Only an https script address is accepted.

The middleware leaves alone: the admin, anything that is not text/html, any status other than 200, a streaming response, a body another middleware has compressed, a page with no closing body tag, and a page that already carries the widget.

Checks

manage.py check reports three mistakes:

Tests

pip install django
PYTHONPATH=src:. python -m django test --settings=tests.settings

Support

hello@asyntai.com

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.