django-hostmap

Host-based URL routing and host-aware reversing for Django, with zero call-site changes.

django-hostmap routes requests to different URLconfs by host (subdomain or full domain) and makes URL reversing host-aware without changing a single call site: the stock reverse(), reverse_lazy() and {% url %} keep working everywhere, including inside third-party apps. Links within the current host stay path-relative, exactly as Django produces them; links to views on another host come back as absolute URLs. Configuration is one declarative host map in settings plus one middleware.

It is the ecosystem's replacement for django-hosts, whose parallel reverse API forces invasive changes across templates and Python code and cannot fix third-party apps that call django.urls.reverse().

Installation

pip install django-hostmap

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

MIDDLEWARE = [
    "django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware",
    "hostmap.middleware.HostmapMiddleware",  # before CommonMiddleware
    "django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware",
    # ...
]

ROOT_URLCONF remains required (Django needs it at startup) and should point at the default entry's URLconf (hostmap.W003 warns on mismatch).

The host map

HOSTMAP = {
    "www": {"subdomain": "www", "urlconf": "config.urls.www"},
    "api": {"subdomain": "api", "urlconf": "config.urls.api"},
    "apex": {"host": "example.com", "redirect_to": "www"},
}
HOSTMAP_PARENT_DOMAIN = "example.com"
HOSTMAP_DEFAULT = "www"

With www active:

Same-host links stay relative; cross-host links come back absolute. Nothing at the call site changes.

Settings

Explicit API

For code that needs an absolute URL regardless of the active host (emails, Celery tasks, API payloads, webhooks):

from hostmap.urls import reverse, build_absolute_uri, use_host

build_absolute_uri("api:user-detail", args=[7])          # always absolute
with use_host("api"):
    reverse("user-detail", args=[7])                     # api active

with use_host(host="acme.example.com"):                  # a wildcard host
    reverse("dashboard")

Development story

Modern browsers resolve *.localhost to loopback (RFC 6761), so the whole map works locally with no /etc/hosts edits:

HOSTMAP_PARENT_DOMAIN = "localhost"
HOSTMAP_SCHEME = "http"
HOSTMAP_PORT = "8000"
ALLOWED_HOSTS = [".localhost"]

Behind a proxy

Host routing is only as good as the Host header that reaches Django. Behind a reverse proxy, either the proxy passes Host through unchanged or the deployment sets USE_X_FORWARDED_HOST = True with the proxy sending X-Forwarded-Host. Misrouted hosts behind nginx are otherwise the first support issue.

Escape hatch

HOSTMAP_PATCH_REVERSE = False degrades cleanly to routing-only: the stock reverse() is left untouched (cross-host links regress to paths), routing keeps working, and the explicit API still works. Set it if a Django upgrade lands before a compatible django-hostmap release; the startup self-test and hostmap.E009/hostmap.W004 catch a Django upgrade running ahead of the package's tested ceiling before anything breaks. With the patch active (the default), an unverified Django version is hostmap.E009, an Error that fails startup, since the patch hooks a private resolver seam that has not been verified there; with the patch off, the same condition is only hostmap.W004, a Warning, since routing-only operation never touches that seam.

Diagnostics

manage.py hostmap    # print the resolved map for the current settings

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.