django-url-tracker 0.1.3

Installation

Installation is as easy as:

pip install django-url-tracker

Done!

Configuration

To start using url_tracker in your project. Just add the following two lines to your settings.py:

1. Add the middleware url_tracker.middleware.URLChangePermanentRedirectMiddleware to the end of MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES which should look similar to this afterwards:

   MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
       'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
       'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
       'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
       'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
       'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
       'django.contrib.flatpages.middleware.FlatpageFallbackMiddleware',
       'url_tracker.middleware.URLChangePermanentRedirectMiddleware',
   )

2. Add url_tracker to your INSTALLED_APPS

   INSTALLED_APPS = (
        "url_tracker",
   )

Now you are able to use url_tracker within you project. All that remains to do is registering a model for tracking.

Tracking A Model

This is just a simple example of how to track a model. Let’s assume we have a model Project that hold details on this particular project and is made available at the URL http://www.example.com/project/some-project/. The project’s URL is based on the SlugField of our model. The model could look like this:

class Project(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
    slug = models.SlugField(max_length=20)
    description = models.CharField(max_length=500)

I will not go into details of how to create the slug as I think this is common practise. So for now we just assume that slug is populated automatically from name. One other thing, however, is required for the tracker to work, the get_absolute_url method. Let’s add this to the model:

class Project(models.Model):
    ...

    @models.permalink
    def get_absolute_url(self):
        return ('project-detail', (), {'slug': self.slug})

And now the missing link to actually start tracking URL changes is adding the following command to the bottom of the class definition, or the file for that matter:

import url_tracker
url_tracker.track_url_changes_for_model(Project)

You are done. If you go to the admin interface, create a new project and then change its slug (which changes its URL) you will see a new URLChangeRecord reflecting the change. Opening the old_url should then redirect you to the new_url.

Contributing

If you find issues or would like to see a feature suppored, head over to the issues section: and report it.

To contribute code in any form, fork the github repository: and clone it locally. Create a new branch for your feature:

git commit -b feature/whatever-you-like

push the finished feature to github and open a pull request form the branch.