django-valerie 0.1

A Django app that provides a singleton model so you can store your settings in the database.

A Django app that provides a singleton model so you can store your settings in the database.

Supports Python 3.6-3.8 or later and Django 2.2-3.1.

Quickstart

Install the app using pip:

pip install django-valerie

Add it to your installed apps:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
  ...
  'valerie',
]

Create a model for your settings, for example:

# models.py
from django.db import models

from valerie.models import Settings


class MySettings(Settings):

    site = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    logo = models.FileField(upload_to="files")
    comments = models.BooleanField()

Create settings.py next to the model and add the default values for each field:

from django.core.files.uploadedfile import SimpleUploadedFile


SETTINGS_DEFAULTS = {
    "MySettings": {
        "id": 1,
        "site": "My Awesome Site",
        "logo": SimpleUploadedFile("logo.png", None),
        "comments": True,
    }
}

Now register the settings with the Django Admin:

from django.contrib import admin

from valerie.admin import SettingsAdmin

from .models import MySettings


@admin.register(MySettings)
class MySettingsAdmin(SettingsAdmin):
    pass

The record is added, using the defaults, to the database on demand so you can immediately use the settings in your code without needing to do any migrations:

settings = MySettings.fetch()

Or in a template by giving the <app>.<model> path:

{% load valerie_tags %}

{% valerie_settings "myapp.MySettings" as settings %}

You can now turn over control to your site admin staff to update the values.

Caching

If you have caching enabled there are three settings which control whether and where the settings object is cached and for how long::

SETTINGS_CACHE_NAME = 'default'

SETTINGS_CACHE_TIMEOUT = 60 * 60  # 1 hour

SETTINGS_CACHE_PREFIX = "settings"

The default stores the settings in the default cache for 1 hour (which seems reasonable given they should change relatively slowly).

The cache is refreshed whenever a settings object is accessed and the cache entry had expired. The cache is also updated every time a settings object is saved.

The settings are stored in valerie.settings so the app has sensible defaults. You can override some or all of these in the Django settings.

Sensible defaults

The default values for each required field in your settings model are defined in setting SETTINGS_DEFAULTS which is a dictionary with entries for each Settings class in and apps’ models:

SETTINGS_DEFAULTS = {
    "MySettings": {
        "id": 1,
        "site": "My Awesome Site",
        "logo": SimpleUploadedFile("logo.png", None),
        "comments": True,
    }
}

As with the cache settings any Settings subclass loads the values from settings.py in the same app then checks the (main) Django settings for any overrides. That make it easy to use django-valerie in an app you distribute as your sensible defaults can be overridden as needed.

Demo site

If you check out the code from the repository, the project contains a demo site with an example app that contains concrete subclass of the Settings class so you can see how django-valerie works.

Make it so

The project has a Makefile that contains a number of targets to support the development process. The most useful are probably tests for running the tests and runserver for running the demo site to show the Django Admin site. There is also a set of targets to manage the release process.

You can read a brief description by running make on the command line:

make

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• django-solo