README

A bundle of several Python and Django utilities used by many department applications.

This package installs the following dependencies (not version-pinned, include explicit versions in requirement.txt above this if required:

Django
Requests
Bottle
django-confy
iPython
django-extensions
gevent
django-uwsgi
django-redis
psycopg2

Future plans:

Include sample settings file for django to load a lot of stuff from env (uses django-confy)
Anything else repurposable across a lot of projects that changes a small amount (backend/util lib focused stuff, no ui components like templates/stylesheets and no data models)

Django functionality

SSO Login Middleware

This will automatically login and create users using headers from an upstream proxy (REMOTE_USER and some others). The logout view will redirect to a separate logout page which clears the SSO session.

Install with pip, then add the following to django settings.py (note middleware must come after session and contrib.auth). Also note that the auth backend "django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend" is in AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS as this middleware depends on it for retrieving the logged in user for a session (will still work without it, but will reauthenticate the session on every request, and request.user.is_authenticated() won't work properly/will be false).

#!python
# settings.py
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    ...,
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'dpaw_utils.middleware.SSOLoginMiddleware'
)

Setting environment variables via django-confy

To set environment variables using django-confy, modify the project manage.py as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import confy
import os
import sys

confy.read_environment_file()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "project_dir.settings")
    from django.core.management import execute_from_command_line
    execute_from_command_line(sys.argv)

Modify the project wsgi.py as follows:

import confy
from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
import os

confy.read_environment_file('.env')
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "project_dir.settings")

Include a .env file in the root of your project containing required variables (should be gitignored):

DATABASE_URL="postgis://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/DATABASE_NAME"
SECRET_KEY="ThisIsASecretKey"

Audit model mixin and middleware

AuditMixin is an extension of Django.db.model.Model that adds a number of additional fields:

creator - FK to AUTH_USER_MODEL, used to record the object creator
modifier - FK to AUTH_USER_MODEL, used to record who the object was last modified by
created - a timestamp that is set on initial object save
modified - an auto-updating timestamp (on each object save)

AuditMiddleware is a middleware that will process any request for an object having a creator or modifier field, and automatically set those to the request user via a pre_save signal.

uWSGI configuration

An example uWSGI configuration (assumes that the virtualenv dir is called venv, and that it is present in the project directory):