django-easy-tenants 0.4.0

Easy to create applications that use tenants in django

easy-tenants

This is a Django app for managing multiple tenants on the same project instance using a shared approach.

Background

There are typically three solutions for solving the multitenancy problem:

1. Isolated Approach: Separate Databases. Each tenant has it’s own database.
2. Semi Isolated Approach: Shared Database, Separate Schemas. One database for all tenants, but one schema per tenant.
3. Shared Approach: Shared Database, Shared Schema. All tenants share the same database and schema. There is a main tenant-table, where all other tables have a foreign key pointing to.

This application implements the third approach, which in our opinion, is the best solution for a large amount of tenants.

For more information: Building Multi Tenant Applications with Django

Below is a demonstration of the features in each approach for an application with 5000 tenants.

Approach	Number of DB	Number of Schemas	Django migration time	Public access
Isolated	5000	5000	slow (1/DB)	No
Semi Isolated	1	5000	slow (1/Schema)	Yes
Shared	1	1	fast (1)	Yes

How it works

The following image shows the flow of how this application works.

Instalation

Assuming you have django installed, the first step is to install django-easy-tenants.

pip install django-easy-tenants

Now you can import the tenancy module in your Django project.

Setup

It is recommended to install this app at the beginning of a project. In an existing project, depending on the structure of the models, the data migration can be hard.

Add easy_tenants to your INSTALLED_APPS on settings.py.

settings.py

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...,
    'easy_tenants',
]

Create a model which will be the tenant of the application.

yourapp/models.py

from easy_tenants.models import TenantMixin

class Customer(TenantMixin):
    ...

Define on your settings.py which model is your tenant model. Assuming you created Customer inside an app named yourapp, your EASY_TENANTS_MODEL should look like this:

settings.py

EASY_TENANTS_MODEL = 'yourapp.Customer'

Your models, that should have data isolated by tenant, need to inherit from TenantAbstract and the objects need to be replaced by TenantManager().

from django.db import models
from easy_tenants.models import TenantAbstract
from easy_tenants.managers import TenantManager

class Product(TenantAbstract):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=10)

    objects = TenantManager()

To obtain the data for each tenant, it is necessary to define which tenant will be used:

from easy_tenants import set_current_tenant

customer = Customer.objects.first()
set_current_tenant(customer)

Product.objects.all()  # filter by customer

or

from easy_tenants import tenant_context

with tenant_context(customer):
    Product.objects.all()  # filter by customer

To define the tenant to be used, this will depend on the business rule used. Here is an example for creating middleware that defines a tenant:

from django.http import HttpResponse
from easy_tenants import tenant_context

class TenantMiddleware:
    def __init__(self, get_response):
        self.get_response = get_response

    def __call__(self, request):
        customer = get_customer_by_request(request)

        if not customer:
            return HttpResponse("Select tenant")

        with tenant_context(customer):
            return self.get_response(request)

If you want to separate the upload files by tenant, you need to change the DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE configuration (only available for local files).

DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = 'easy_tenants.storage.TenantFileSystemStorage'

Running the example project

python manage.py migrate
python manage.py createsuperuser
python manage.py shell # create 2 customers
python manage.py runserver

Access the page /admin/, create a Customer and then add a user on the created Customer.

Motivation

django-tenant-schemas django-tenants django-scopes