django-clearance

Role, policy and row-level access control for Django. Denied by default.

فارسی

An administrator decides, in Django's admin site and with no code, who may do what - and to which rows, and with which fields:

• bundles of permissions, each given with a scope - "their branch's orders", "their own", or a rule built in the admin site;
• protected fields, read with one permission and written with another;
• status actions - only whoever may approve sets an order to approved;
• roles, optional, with a ceiling nobody with the role goes past.

Every door asks the same rules: Django's views and templates, DRF, the admin site, and your own code. A change is refused when it would let somebody give themselves more. The pages, messages and permissions come in English and Persian, and read right to left in Persian.

In a project

pip install 'django-clearance[drf]'

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'clearance.admin.apps.ClearanceAdminConfig',   # instead of 'django.contrib.admin'
    ...
    'clearance',
]

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = ['clearance.backends.ClearanceBackend']

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES': ['clearance.drf.permissions.ModelPolicyPermission'],
}

class OrderViewSet(ScopedModelViewSet):  # the rows, the policy, the fields - asked
    queryset = Order.objects.all()
    serializer_class = OrderSerializer


Order.objects.visible_to(user, 'edit')  # the orders this person may edit

• The guide - every part, how to use it.
• The example shop - a project using all of it, to run.
• The design - why it is built the way it is.

Python 3.11 to 3.14; Django 5.2, 6.0 and 6.1; Django REST framework 3.16 and later, optional; any database Django supports.

Working on it

Every check runs through nox, the same sessions locally and in CI. With uv installed, a Python that is missing is fetched for you.

uv tool install nox

nox -s lint

nox -s types

nox -s tests

tests runs every supported Python and Django; one combination is nox -s "tests(3.13-django6.1)", and nox -l lists them all. browser runs the pages in a real browser, messages - with gettext installed - checks that the catalogues hold every string the library marks, and package builds the wheel and runs the example project on it.

The suite uses SQLite unless told otherwise. To run it on PostgreSQL, as CI does, set CLEARANCE_TEST_DATABASE=postgres; the connection is read from the standard PGHOST, PGPORT, PGUSER, PGPASSWORD and PGDATABASE variables (defaults: localhost, 5432, postgres, postgres, clearance).

CLEARANCE_TEST_DATABASE=postgres nox -s tests

After marking a string, extract it with nox -s messages, translate what it added in locale/fa/LC_MESSAGES/django.po, and compile:

cd src/clearance && django-admin compilemessages

Licence

BSD 3-Clause - see LICENSE.