django-guardian

django-guardian is an implementation of per-object permissions on top of Django’s authorization backend. Read an introduction to per-object permissions on djangoadvent articles.

Documentation

Online documentation is available at https://django-guardian.readthedocs.io/.

See real-world usage: Check out Who Uses Guardian to see how thousands of projects worldwide use django-guardian in production.

Contributing

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md before opening a pull request. It documents the repository's issue-first workflow, branch targeting rules, local uv setup, required test and lint commands, documentation expectations, and AI/LLM contribution policy.

If you need to report a security issue, do not open a public issue. Follow SECURITY.md and use the repository's private vulnerability reporting flow.

Installation

To install django-guardian into your project run:

uv add django-guardian

TIP: Not using a package manager like uv or poetry for your django project? You probably should try them :). In the meantime, pip install django-guardian works just fine too.

Configuration

We need to hook django-guardian into our project.

Put guardian into your INSTALLED_APPS at settings module:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'guardian',
)

Add extra authorization backend to your settings.py:

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
    'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',
    'guardian.backends.ObjectPermissionBackend',
)

Create guardian database tables by running:

python manage.py migrate

Usage

After installation and project hooks we can finally use object permissions with Django.

Lets start really quickly:

>>> from django.contrib.auth.models import User, Group
>>> jack = User.objects.create_user('jack', 'jack@example.com', 'topsecretagentjack')
>>> admins = Group.objects.create(name='admins')
>>> jack.has_perm('change_group', admins)
False
>>> from guardian.shortcuts import assign_perm
>>> assign_perm('change_group', jack, obj=admins)
<UserObjectPermission: admins | jack | change_group>
>>> jack.has_perm('change_group', admins)
True

Of course our agent jack here would not be able to change_group globally:

>>> jack.has_perm('change_group')
False

Admin integration

Replace admin.ModelAdmin with GuardedModelAdmin for those models which should have object permissions support within admin panel.

For example:

from django.contrib import admin
from myapp.models import Author
from guardian.admin import GuardedModelAdmin

# Old way:
#class AuthorAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
#    pass

# With object permissions support
class AuthorAdmin(GuardedModelAdmin):
    pass

admin.site.register(Author, AuthorAdmin)

Django Unfold integration

Users of django-unfold will find that guardian is supported out of the box via a contrib module.

Metadata

Release files for django-guardian 3.5.1

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for django-guardian 3.5.1
File	Size	Uploaded
django_guardian-3.5.1.tar.gz	120.2 kB	Oct 16, 2026	Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for django-guardian 3.5.1
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
django_guardian-3.5.1-py3-none-any.whl 156.7 kB Oct 16, 2026	Python 3	none	any	Details

Total release size: 276.9 kB

Release files / django_guardian-3.5.1.tar.gz

Download URL	django_guardian-3.5.1.tar.gz
Size	120.2 kB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`05e96e729dfaaeea1f938ba475062b4b2b07d4193bbfaa3ef23611336d122ca1`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`83ae5d211238341c393cd8a3ca916acb45bacd5141bd438cc7dbe23d8decab83`
Upload date	Oct 16, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	Yes
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14`

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Identity

Publishing platform: GitHub Actions
Publishing repository: github.com/django-guardian/django-guardian
Publishing commit: github.com/django-guardian/django-guardian/tree/d1a406e86fe8b0db7db3808afe30d4935525a85e

Workflow

Publishing configuration: github.com/django-guardian/django-guardian/blob/d1a406e86fe8b0db7db3808afe30d4935525a85e/.github/workflows/release-publish.yml
Publishing logs: github.com/django-guardian/django-guardian/actions/runs/38950903645/attempts/1

Artifact

Subject: django_guardian-3.5.1.tar.gz
SHA-256 checksum: 05e96e729dfaaeea1f938ba475062b4b2b07d4193bbfaa3ef23611336d122ca1 Verifying attestations

Release files / django_guardian-3.5.1-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	django_guardian-3.5.1-py3-none-any.whl
Size	156.7 kB
Tags	Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`961cda884db361a8dd8d1efc6d890d7a90991f56a1bafe5d3f6239663ec03aec`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`ffcf4542ab5e477efd11c131b09260b7f81021494852f2ae2719c048d53f72a1`
Upload date	Oct 16, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	Yes
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14`

Provenance

Identity

Publishing platform: GitHub Actions
Publishing repository: github.com/django-guardian/django-guardian
Publishing commit: github.com/django-guardian/django-guardian/tree/d1a406e86fe8b0db7db3808afe30d4935525a85e

Workflow

Publishing configuration: github.com/django-guardian/django-guardian/blob/d1a406e86fe8b0db7db3808afe30d4935525a85e/.github/workflows/release-publish.yml
Publishing logs: github.com/django-guardian/django-guardian/actions/runs/38950903645/attempts/1

Artifact

Subject: django_guardian-3.5.1-py3-none-any.whl
SHA-256 checksum: 961cda884db361a8dd8d1efc6d890d7a90991f56a1bafe5d3f6239663ec03aec Verifying attestations