Entries published on November 21, 2007
Auth tips and tricks
Django’s bundled authentication framework is stupendously useful as an out-of-the-box solution for common user-authentication needs, and provides a ton of things basically for free: users, permissions, groups, login/logout functionality, middleware for automatically detecting the user’s identity, the ability to restrict views based on various attributes (including staff members, superusers, permissions and arbitrary tests), the list goes on and on. For probably 90% or more of the applications you’ll develop, the simple combination of the User model and the built-in login/logout views and middleware will take care of your needs just fine, but there’s a lot more functionality lurking in the …
Initial data and install-time code
A fairly frequently-asked question is something along the lines of “how do I provide some data which gets installed along with my application?”, or some variation on that, often including questions about how to ensure a particular bit of code is run when the application is installed via syncdb. Django provides several different ways of approaching this, depending on the exact situation and exactly what you need to do, and while they’re mostly documented it still seems to cause a lot of questions. So today let’s run down the different options and see where each one is appropriate.