Django under the hood provides an app called Admin a.k.a Django Admin, which provides Admin UI interface/web page for your Django Project. This admin interface can automatically generate CRUD views/ (form/tables) for your models with very minimal setup i.e (Registering your models to admin)
This Admin app is usually said to be one of the most powerful parts of Django
Let's deep to use Django Admin on our projects
Using Django Admin/ Registering Models
Creating a test Model named Information
from django.db import models
class Information(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
date_of_birth = models.DateField()
salary = models.IntegerField()
Don't forget to create migrations and then migrate
Registering your models to Django Admin
- Open up
admin.py file that exists in your app (when you create django app through manage.py startapp [app] command, you will automatically get this file along other files like models.py that we have been using)
To let Django Admin work for our models, we simply register our model class on this admin.py file, by using admin.site.register()
from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Information
admin.site.register(Information)
Create Superuser to login to Django Admin
- Because Django also contains a built in Auth/User app which we can use to manage users and authentication, we can easily use this to create our superuser/login mechanism and everything works like a magic
- You can always create a new
User app and authentication process, but we will leave that for another tutorial
- On your shell, run
python manage.py createsuperuser command
- This command will ask bunch of questions to fill up the
User table with attributes is_staff and is_superuser set to True. This, attributes are the table columns
- Django admin/UI login requires
is_staff or is_superuser set to True for authorization
Which means, anyone, any user on our project can initiate login to the admin site but won't get access since other users is_staff and is_superuser are set to False
-> python manage.py createsuperuser
Username (leave blank to use 'djangotherightway'): admin
Email address: admin@example.com
Password:
Password (again):
Superuser created successfully.
login to Django Admin Site
- So, we completed our core process for working out with Django Admin, we now need a URL through which we can access our Admin Site
Register Admin urls to our urls.py
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path
urlpatterns = [
path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
]
- Now, we can access our admin site through /admin/ url
- I suggest to change this from
/admin/ to something unguessable, so as to prevent users from bruteforcing this page or accessing this page. In production environment, i usually disable this url path
By default, when creating a project using django-admin startproject [project] command, Django will automatically do this for us
Run your Django server using python manage.py runserver and navigate to /admin/
Now, login using the credentials we just created on Step-3, and you will be able to see the model we registered on Step-2
You can now, perform CRUD operations to your models, like add a new object/row, view all objects/rows, update and delete
You may see that Groups and Users models are already registered on Django admin through we didn't do it manually. This is because this Auth app has already registered those models on its admin.py file. You can see the code on github here
Customizing Django Admin Site
Django admin site is super customizable, but we will see some basics so that you can get some idea about its customizations.
Customizing Admin view for models can be done through admin.ModelAdmin class. We basically create a class using/subclassing admin.ModelAdmin and then tell Django admin to use this custom ModelAdmin while registering a model
Customize Table display field
- When you see the table page for your models like from the above example, you will see something like this (assuming you have created two records/objects)
This table view doesn't look nice, so lets add some columns/fields on this table view using list_display attributes on admin.ModelAdmin
from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Information
class InformationAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
list_display = ('name', 'date_of_birth', 'salary')
admin.site.register(Information, InformationAdmin)
- Now, save the changes and run your server, you will see the table now has name, date_of_birth and salary fields
Add custom fields to table List Display
Let's create up age field obtained from date_of_birth and display it on the list display table fields
from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Information
class InformationAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
list_display = ('name', 'date_of_birth', 'salary', 'age')
@admin.display()
def age(self, obj):
from datetime import datetime
current_year = datetime.today().year
born_year = obj.date_of_birth.year
return current_year - born_year
Adding filters
We can use list_filters attribute to set filter fields
from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Information
class InformationAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
list_filters=['date_of_birth']
admin.site.register(Information,InformationAdmin)
These were all basics things that we can do with Django Admin interface, but there are much more advance customizations available to use.
If i should write more on advanced Customization, let me know in comments.
