django-tracking 0.4.1

Basic visitor tracking and blacklisting for Django

django-tracking is a simple attempt at keeping track of visitors to Django-powered Web sites. It also offers basic blacklisting capabilities.

The offial repository for django-tracking is at http://bitbucket.org/codekoala/django-tracking. Please file any tickets there.

Features

• Tracks the following information about your visitors:

  • Session key

  • IP address

  • User agent

  • Whether or not they are a registered user and logged in

  • Where they came from (http-referer)

  • What page on your site they last visited

  • How many pages on your site they have visited

• Allows user-agent filtering for visitor tracking

• Automatic clean-up of old visitor records

• Can ban certain IP addresses, rendering the site useless to visitors from those IP’s (great for stopping spam)

• The ability to have a live feed of active users on your website

• Template tags to:

  • display how many active users there are on your site

  • determine how many active users are on the same page within your site

• Optional “Active Visitors Map” to see where visitors are in the world

Requirements

As far as I am aware, the only requirement for django-tracking to work is a modern version of Django. I developed the project on Django 1.0 alpha 2 and beta 1. It is designed to work with the newforms-admin functionality.

If you wish to use a Google Map to display where your visitors are probably at, you must have a Google Maps API key, which is free. You are required to have the GeoIP C API library installed. You might want to grab the GeoLite City binary unless you are a paying MaxMind customer. This is the data file that django-tracking uses to translate an IP into a location on the planet. Configuring this feature is discussed later.

Installation

Download django-tracking using one of the following methods:

pip

You can download the package from the CheeseShop or use:

pip install django-tracking

to download and install django-tracking.

easy_install

You can download the package from the CheeseShop or use:

easy_install django-tracking

to download and install django-tracking.

Checkout from BitBucket/GitHub/Google Code

Use one of the following commands:

hg clone http://bitbucket.org/codekoala/django-tracking
git clone http://github.com/codekoala/django-tracking.git
hg clone http://django-tracking.googlecode.com/hg/ django-tracking

Package Download

Download the latest .tar.gz file from the downloads section and extract it somewhere you’ll remember.

Configuration

First of all, you must add this project to your list of INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    ...
    'tracking',
    ...
)

Run manage.py syncdb. This creates a few tables in your database that are necessary for operation.

Depending on how you wish to use this application, you have a few options:

Visitor Tracking

Add tracking.middleware.VisitorTrackingMiddleware to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES in settings.py. It must be underneath the AuthenticationMiddleware, so that request.user exists.

Automatic Visitor Clean-Up

If you want to have Django automatically clean past visitor information out your database, put tracking.middleware.VisitorCleanUpMiddleware in your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES.

IP Banning

Add tracking.middleware.BannedIPMiddleware to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES in settings.py. I would recommend making this the very first item in MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES so your banned users do not have to drill through any other middleware before Django realizes they don’t belong on your site.

Visitors on Page (template tag)

Make sure that django.core.context_processors.request is somewhere in your TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS tuple. This context processor makes the request object accessible to your templates. This application uses the request object to determine what page the user is looking at in a template tag.

Active Visitors Map

If you’re interested in seeing where your visitors are at a given point in time, you might enjoy the active visitor map feature. Be sure you have added a line to your main URLconf, as follows:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    ....
    (r'^tracking/', include('tracking.urls')),
    ....
)

Next, set a couple of settings in your settings.py:

• GOOGLE_MAPS_KEY: Your very own Google Maps API key

• TRACKING_USE_GEOIP: set this to True if you want to see markers on the map

• GEOIP_PATH: set this to the absolute path on the filesystem of your GeoIP.dat or GeoIPCity.dat or whatever file. It’s usually something like /usr/local/share/GeoIP.dat or /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat.

• GEOIP_CACHE_TYPE: The type of caching to use when dealing with GeoIP data:

  • 0: read database from filesystem, uses least memory.

  • 1: load database into memory, faster performance but uses more memory.

  • 2: check for updated database. If database has been updated, reload filehandle and/or memory cache.

  • 4: just cache the most frequently accessed index portion of the database, resulting in faster lookups than GEOIP_STANDARD, but less memory usage than GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE - useful for larger databases such as GeoIP Organization and GeoIP City. Note, for GeoIP Country, Region and Netspeed databases, GEOIP_INDEX_CACHE is equivalent to GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE. default

• DEFAULT_TRACKING_TEMPLATE: The template to use when generating the visitor map. Defaults to tracking/visitor_map.html.

When that’s done, you should be able to go to /tracking/map/ on your site (replacing tracking with whatever prefix you chose to use in your URLconf, obviously). The default template relies upon jQuery for its awesomeness, but you’re free to use whatever you would like.

Usage

To display the number of active users there are in one of your templates, make sure you have {% load tracking_tags %} somewhere in your template and do something like this:

{% visitors_on_site as visitors %}
<p>
    {{ visitors }} active user{{ visitors|pluralize }}
</p>

If you also want to show how many people are looking at the same page:

{% visitors_on_page as same_page %}
<p>
    {{ same_page }} of {{ visitors }} active user{{ visitors|pluralize }}
    {% ifequal same_page 1 %}is{% else %}are{% endifequal %} reading this page
</p>

If you don’t want particular areas of your site to be tracked, you may define a list of prefixes in your settings.py using the NO_TRACKING_PREFIXES. For example, if you didn’t want visits to the /family/ section of your website, set NO_TRACKING_PREFIXES to ['/family/'].

If you don’t want to count certain user-agents, such as Yahoo!’s Slurp and Google’s Googlebot, you may add keywords to your visitor tracking in your Django administration interface. Look for “Untracked User-Agents” and add a keyword that distinguishes a particular user-agent. Any visitors with the keyword in their user-agent string will not be tracked.

By default, active users include any visitors within the last 10 minutes. If you would like to override that setting, just set TRACKING_TIMEOUT to however many minutes you want in your settings.py.

For automatic visitor clean-up, any records older than 24 hours are removed by default. If you would like to override that setting, set TRACKING_CLEANUP_TIMEOUT to however many hours you want in your settings.py.

Good luck! Please contact me with any questions or concerns you have with the project!