Django Neuralyzer

Anonymize instance data according to your need (GDPR, used in not-so-safe environments... )

Heavily inspired by django-anon

Like django-anon, django-neuralyzer will help you anonymize your model instance so it can be shared among developers, helping to reproduce bugs and make performance improvements in a production-like environment.

It also provide ability to target specific instance and not the whole database at once, so it can be use for GDPR compliance or "forget about be" feature of your app.

Usage

In your application, for instance in neuralyzers.py files, create a class that inherit of django-neuralyzer.BaseNeuralyzer to define your neuralyzer classes:

from django_neuralyzer.base import BaseNeuralyzer

from your_app.models import Person

class PersonNeuralyzer(BaseNeuralyzer):
   email = "example@anonymized.org"

   # You can use static values instead of callables
   is_admin = False

   class Meta:
      model = Person

Then, use the neuralyzer:

# run neuralyzer: be cautious, this will affect your current database!
person = Person.objects.last()

# neuralyze full table:
PersonNeuralyzer().run()

# neuralyze only some instance
PersonNeuralyzer().run(filters={"pk": person.pk})

Lazy attributes

Lazy attributes can be defined as inline lambdas or methods, as shown below, using the lazy_attribute function/decorator.

from django_neuralyzer.base import BaseNeuralyzer, lazy_attribute

from your_app.models import Person

class PersonNeuralyzer(BaseNeuralyzer):
   name = lazy_attribute(lambda o: 'x' * len(o.name))

   @lazy_attribute
   def date_of_birth(self):
      """Keep year and month"""
      return self.date_of_birth.replace(day=1)

   class Meta:
      model = Person

Management command

First, to have access to the management command, you need to register the app

INSTALLED_APPS = [
  ...
  "django_neuralyzer",
  ...
]

2 management command are given:

1. ensure_fields_are_handled command
2. export_neuralyzed_fields command

Ensure that all fields are neuralyzed

Ensure that all field of your model are handle by the neuralyzer:

django-manage ensure_fields_are_handled

If you want to ensure a field is handled, but you don't want to change its value, you can set it to NEURALYZER_NOOP:

from django_neuralyzer.base import BaseNeuralyzer, NEURALYZER_NOOP

from your_app.models import Person

class PersonNeuralyzer(BaseNeuralyzer):
   id = NEURALYZER_NOOP
   name = lazy_attribute(lambda o: 'x' * len(o.name))

   class Meta:
      model = Person

this way, ensure_fields_are_handled will not complain that id is not handled.

Export neuralyzed fields

It may be handy to export what fields are neuralyzed and how. Run the

django-manage export_neuralyzed_fields

and a neuralyzed_fields.csv will be created at the root of your application.

In order to document the lazy_attribute, the docstring of the function will be used to document how this field is neuralyzed.

Why neuralyzer ?

In Men in Black, a "neuralyzer" is a tool that wipe the mind of anybody who sees the flash via isolating and editing certain element of their memory.

This is exactly what this django package intent to do (remove or fake some attributes of instances), so we find it funny to name it like that.