edx-django-sites-extensions 4.0.0

Custom extensions for the Django sites framework

Part of edX code.

edx-django-sites-extensions

This package includes extensions to the Django “sites” framework used by Open edX Django IDAs (independently deployable applications).

Overview

In order to support multitenancy in an IDA, it is helpful to make use of the Django “sites” framework.

One shortcoming of the Django “sites” framework is the fact that the CurrentSiteMiddleware provided by the framework that adds the current site to incoming requests does not allow you to fall back to a site that you can configure in settings in case the current site cannot be determined from the host of the incoming request.

The Django app provided by this package overcomes this issue by monkey patching the django.contrib.sites.models.SiteManager.get_current() function which is called by the CurrentSiteMiddleware to determine the current site. The patched version of this function will first try to determine the current site by checking the host of the incoming request and attempting to match a site by domain. If a site cannot be found this way, it will fall back to the default site configured by setting the SITE_ID setting.

Another issue with the Django “sites” framework is that it uses an in-memory cache of Site models which makes it difficult to update models associated with the Site model via Django admin and have those updates be reflected across all Python processes in a multi-process application environment.

Again the Django app provided by this package monkey patches the private SiteManager query functions that implement the in-memory caching mechanism to add a configurable timeout to the Site cache allowing model updates to be reflected across all processes after the specified timeout.

To enable this functionality in your Django project:

Install this package in your python environment

$ pip install edx-django-sites-extensions

Add django.contrib.sites.middleware.CurrentSiteMiddleware to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES list.

Set the SITE_ID setting:

SITE_ID = 1

This package also provides a mechanism for settings up URL redirects for your application. It makes use of the Django redirects app and provides middleware which will check for Redirect models whose old_path field matches the path of the incoming request and redirects those requests to the new_path of the Redirect model.

To enable this functionality in your Django project:

Install this package in your python environment

$ pip install edx-django-sites-extensions

Add django_sites_extensions.middleware.RedirectMiddleware to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES list.

You can then use Django admin to create Redirect models.

Documentation

The docs for edx-django-sites-extensions are on Read the Docs: https://edx-django-sites-extensions.readthedocs.org.

License

The code in this repository is licensed under LICENSE_TYPE unless otherwise noted.

Please see LICENSE.txt for details.

How To Contribute

Contributions are very welcome.

Please read How To Contribute for details.

Even though they were written with edx-platform in mind, the guidelines should be followed for Open edX code in general.

Reporting Security Issues

Please do not report security issues in public. Please email [e-mail].

Mailing List and IRC Channel

You can discuss this code in the edx-code Google Group.