django-site-settings 0.2.0

Dynamic site settings for Django with caching

Django Site Settings

Django Site Settings is a reusable Django application designed to manage dynamic, type-safe global configurations directly from the Django Admin panel. Built on top of django-solo, it guarantees a singleton pattern for your core settings while offering an advanced, customizable caching layer.

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Features

• Singleton Architecture: Ensures only one global configuration instance exists.
• Strict Type Validation: Supports String, Integer, Float, and Boolean data types with strict validation on save.
• High-Performance Caching: Automatically caches values to minimize database hits.
• Multi-Cache Support: Seamlessly integrates with your existing cache infrastructure (Redis, Memcached, etc.).
• Smart Cache Invalidation: Uses Django signals to instantly purge modified or deleted keys.
• Template Tag Ready: Built-in template tags to fetch settings directly inside your HTML layouts.

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Requirements

• Python: 3.10, 3.11, 3.12+
• Django: 5.0, 6.0+
• django-solo: 2.3.0+

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Installation

Via pip

pip install django-site-settings

Via Poetry

To add the package as a dependency using Poetry, run the following command:

poetry add django-site-settings

Configuration

1. Add solo and django_site_settings to your project's INSTALLED_APPS inside settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ... Django core apps
    
    "solo",
    "django_site_settings",
    
    # ... Your local apps
]

2. Run the database migrations:

python manage.py migrate

Advanced Customization (Optional)

You can customize the caching behavior by adding the following variables to your main Django settings.py:

# Cache TTL in seconds (Default is 7 days)
SITE_SETTINGS_CACHE_TIMEOUT = 86400  # 24 hours

# Specify which cache backend configuration from your CACHES setting to use (Default is "default")
SITE_SETTINGS_CACHE_ALIAS = "fast_redis"

Usage

Admin Panel Interface

Once installed and configured, a new section called Site Settings Engine will automatically appear in your main Django administration index:

Global Configuration Management Clicking on Global Configuration provides a clean, unified dashboard where you can manage all custom variables as transactional setting items.

Empty State: Upon initialization, the dashboard presents a clean tabular inline structure layout, ready for keys assignment:

Populated State with Validation: You can dynamically add keys, provide descriptive notes for your team, select strict target data types (e.g., Boolean, Float), and input their corresponding values natively:

Fetching Settings in Python Code

Use the get_setting utility function anywhere in your Python business logic (services, models, tasks, or utilities) with automatic type conversion:

from django_site_settings.utils import get_setting

# Safely pulls from cache with strict type conversion
max_attempts = get_setting("MAX_LOGIN_ATTEMPTS", default=3)
is_maintenance = get_setting("MAINTENANCE_MODE", default=False)
api_timeout = get_setting("EXTERNAL_API_TIMEOUT", default=5.0)

if is_maintenance:
    # Handle maintenance logic directly
    pass

Fetching Settings inside Django Templates

Load the custom template tags to output values natively inside your HTML files:

{% load site_settings_tags %}

<footer>
    <p>Contact Support: {% site_setting "SUPPORT_EMAIL" default="[e-mail]" %}</p>
    
    {% site_setting "SHOW_PROMO_BANNER" default=False as show_banner %}
    {% if show_banner %}
        <div class="banner">Big sale active!</div>
    {% endif %}
</footer>

Advanced Features: Global Site Announcements

The django-site-settings package includes a built-in notification engine powered by the SiteAnnouncement model. This feature allows administrators to broadcast multiple urgent alerts, maintenance windows, or marketing banners across the platform simultaneously, mimicking enterprise-tier SaaS announcement architectures.

Key Highlights

• Stacked Alerts Support: Display multiple active notifications at once.
• Smart Priority Sorting: Announcements are automatically arranged based on a customizable priority scale (e.g., critical danger alerts float to the top).
• Automated Lifecycles: Schedule banners to activate (start_at) and expire (end_at) autonomously.
• Data-Level Caching: Active records are evaluated into a memory-efficient Python list layer and cached (cache.get/cache.set), reducing database serialization overhead down to zero under high concurrent traffic.
• Instant Cache Invalidation: Overridden save() and delete() model hooks flush the cache immediately when an administrator updates or removes a record.
• Hybrid Frontend Integration: Choose between native Django Template Tags or a lightweight REST API endpoint.
• Independent Client-side Dismissal: Users can close individual banners. Closure states are safely tracked in browser localStorage using individual record IDs and atomic version timestamps (updated_at) to avoid redundant database or session overhead.

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Implementation Guide

1. Integration via REST API (SPA / Headless Architecture)

Step A: Include Routing

Register the library's URL patterns inside your root Django urls.py configuration:

from django.urls import path, include

urlpatterns = [
    # ... your core project routes
    path("site-settings/", include("django_site_settings.urls")),
]

Step B: Consume the Endpoint

Your frontend application can fetch or poll from the following cache-backed public URI: GET /site-settings/api/announcements/

Example JSON Response Payload:

{
  "announcements": [
    {
      "id": 4,
      "text": "<strong>Urgent:</strong> Scheduled system upgrade on June 8th at 03:00 UTC.",
      "level": "danger",
      "updated_at": 1780920000.0
    },
    {
      "id": 2,
      "text": "Check out our new metrics dashboard module!",
      "level": "info",
      "updated_at": 1780845200.0
    }
  ]
}