Django Registration Wall¶
Django Registration Wall is a Django mixin application that limits an anonymous user‘s access to content, after which the user is redirected to the login URL. The behavior is modeled after the common paywall scenario.
Fake news articles credit goes to The Onion.
Install¶
$ pip install django-registrationwall
Add to settings.py.
INSTALLED_APPS = [
# ...
'regwall',
]
Add to one of your views.py.
from django.views.generic import DetailView
from regwall.mixins import RaiseRegWallMixin
from .models import Article
class ArticleDetailView(RaiseRegWallMixin, DetailView):
model = Article
Contents¶
Install¶
Install with the pip package manager.
$ mkvirtualenv myvenv -p python3
$ pip install django
$ pip install django-registrationwall
After creating a project, add regwall to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py.
INSTALLED_APPS = [
# ...
'regwall',
]
Remember to update your requirements.txt file. In your project directory:
$ pip freeze > requirements.txt
Usage¶
Views¶
The app is almost entirely a mixin that subclasses Django’s AccessMixin. Import the mixin and subclass it in a DetailView or a view that uses SingleObjectMixin.
from django.views.generic import DetailView
from regwall.mixins import RaiseRegWallMixin
from .models import Article
class ArticleDetailView(RaiseRegWallMixin, DetailView):
model = Article
On each request, the mixin increments the number of consumed resources and checks its count against the REGWALL_LIMIT setting. Resources contain information about each view’s main object, which means the mixin expects to be added to views that focus on a single object such as DetailView, although technically any view that incorporates SingleObjectMixin is valid.
The app stores the visited resources into the browser session, whose session ID is stored in a cookie in the user’s web browser. The app does not employ more sophisticated user tracking such as IP detection and storage.
Template tags¶
The bulk of the app’s logic is in the mixin, but template tags allow for display of the list of resources consumed, the limit, and the days of expiration.
Load the template tags.
{% load regwall_tags %}
Assign any of the tags’ output to a variable with the as syntax.
{% load regwall_tags %}
{% get_regwall_limit as regwall_limit %}
{% get_regwall_expire as regwall_expire %}
{% get_regwall_attempts as regwall_attempts %}
{% get_regwall_successes as regwall_successes %}
Use the assigned variables as you like.
{% get_regwall_limit %}¶
Gets the number of resources a user can consume before the registration wall is raised.
{% load regwall_tags %}
{% get_regwall_limit as regwall_limit %}
<p>The limit is {{ regwall_limit }} articles.</p>
{% get_regwall_expire %}¶
Gets the number of days until the consumed resources count is reset to zero.
{% load regwall_tags %}
{% get_regwall_limit as regwall_limit %}
{% get_regwall_expire as regwall_expire %}
<p>The limit is {{ regwall_limit }} articles for {{ regwall_expire }} days.</p>
{% get_regwall_attempts %}¶
Gets a list of the attempted consumed resources. The mixin logs each attempt a user makes for a request, which is not necessarily the same as a successful request. Each item of the list is a dictionary, which contains the app_label, id, headline, and url of a single resource. You will probably use the length filter on get_regwall_attempts to get the number of attempted consumed resources.
{% get_regwall_attempts as regwall_attempts %}
<p>You tried to read {{ regwall_attempts|length }} free articles.</p>
Use get_regwall_attempts to check against the result of get_regwall_limit.
{% get_regwall_limit as regwall_limit %}
{% get_regwall_expire as regwall_expire %}
{% get_regwall_attempts as regwall_attempts %}
{% if regwall_attempts|length >= regwall_limit %}
<p>You read all of your {{ regwall_limit }} articles for {{ regwall_expire }} days.</p>
{% endif %}
{% get_regwall_successes %}¶
Similar to get_regwall_attempts, but get_regwall_successes gets a list of the resources that were successful delivered to the user.
{% load regwall_tags %}
{% get_regwall_limit as regwall_limit %}
{% get_regwall_expire as regwall_expire %}
{% get_regwall_attempts as regwall_attempts %}
{% get_regwall_successes as regwall_successes %}
{% if regwall_attempts|length >= regwall_limit %}
<p>You read all {{ regwall_successes|length }} of your {{ regwall_limit }} articles for {{ regwall_expire }} days.</p>
<ol>
{% for article in regwall_successes %}
<li><a href="{{ article.url }}">{{ article.headline }}</a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ol>
{% endif %}
Note that because different models can use different conventions for what constitutes a “headline,” the template tag checks against these model attributes in this order: headline, title, name, and finally empty string.
Includes¶
To ease the creation of probable messages displayed to users, use (or be inspired by) the app’s template includes in the regwall directory.
regwall/detail.html¶
Usage in a template, intended for a “detail” template whose view probably uses a DetailView of your own creation:
{% include 'regwall/detail.html' %}
The result:
{% load regwall_tags %}
{% get_regwall_attempts as regwall_attempts %}
{% get_regwall_successes as regwall_successes %}
{% get_regwall_limit as regwall_limit %}
{% get_regwall_expire as regwall_expire %}
{% if regwall_successes|length > 0 %}
<p>You read {{ regwall_successes|length }} of your {{ regwall_limit }} free article{{ regwall_limit|pluralize }} for {{ regwall_expire }} day{{ regwall_expire|pluralize }}. <a href="{% url 'login' %}">Log in or register to read unlimited articles</a>.</p>
{% endif %}
regwall/login.html¶
Usage in a template, intended for registration/login.html:
{% include 'regwall/login.html' %}
The result:
{% load regwall_tags %}
{% get_regwall_attempts as regwall_attempts %}
{% get_regwall_successes as regwall_successes %}
{% get_regwall_limit as regwall_limit %}
{% get_regwall_expire as regwall_expire %}
{% if regwall_attempts|length >= regwall_limit %}
<p>You read {{ regwall_successes|length }} of your {{ regwall_limit }} free article{{ regwall_limit|pluralize }} for {{ regwall_expire }} day{{ regwall_expire|pluralize }}. Log in or register to read unlimited articles.</p>
{% endif %}
regwall/history.html¶
Usage in a template, intended for registration/login.html:
{% include 'regwall/history.html' %}
The result:
{% load i18n regwall_tags %}
{% get_regwall_attempts as regwall_attempts %}
{% get_regwall_successes as regwall_successes %}
{% get_regwall_limit as regwall_limit %}
{% if regwall_attempts|length >= regwall_limit %}
<h2>{% trans 'You read these articles' %}</h2>
<ol>
{% for article in regwall_successes %}
<li><a href="{{ article.url }}">{{ article.headline }}</a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ol>
{% endif %}
Demo¶
The repo contains a sample Django project that shows how a typical intergration might occur with the template tags and includes. A fixture with sample data is also included to quickly test.
$ mkvirtualenv -p python3 demo
(demo)$ git clone git@github.com:richardcornish/django-registrationwall.git
(demo)$ cd django-registrationwall/demo/
(demo)$ pip install -r requirements.txt
(demo)$ cd demo/
(demo)$ python manage.py migrate
(demo)$ python manage.py loaddata articles_article.json
(demo)$ python manage.py runserver
Settings¶
The mixin tag offers three settings. By default, they are:
REGWALL_LIMIT = 10
REGWALL_EXPIRE = 30
REGWALL_SOCIAL = [
'google',
'facebook',
'twitter',
]
REGWALL_LIMIT¶
An integer indicating the number of resources to display before the registration wall appears.
The mixin displays 10 resources by default.
REGWALL_EXPIRE¶
An integer indicating the number of days before the consumed resources count is reset to zero.
The mixin resets after 30 days by default.
REGWALL_SOCIAL¶
A list of strings of domains whose referral does not increment the consumed resources count. In other words, visitors coming from these domains are not penalized. Previously, the app used a rudimentary method of domain checking with the urlparse/urllib.parse modules. Because URLs vary so widely in construction, the app now uses the tldextract package to accurately extract the domain. Therefore, this setting should contain only domains and not top-level domains, e.g. ['google', 'facebook', 'twitter'] and not ['google.com', 'facebook.com', 'twitter.com'].
The mixin allows referrals from Google, Facebook, and Twitter by default.
Documentation¶
Full documentation is available online.
However, you can also build the documentation from source. Enter your virtual environment.
$ workon myvenv
Clone the code repository.
$ git clone git@github.com:richardcornish/django-registrationwall.git
$ cd django-registrationwall/
Install Sphinx, sphinx-autobuild, and sphinx_rtd_theme.
$ pip install sphinx sphinx-autobuild sphinx_rtd_theme
Create an HTML build.
$ (cd docs/ && make html)
Or use sphinx-autobuild to watch for live changes.
$ sphinx-autobuild docs/ docs/_build_html
Open 127.0.0.1:8000.
Tests¶
Continuous integration test results are available online.
However, you can also test the source code.
$ workon myvenv
$ django-admin test regwall.tests --settings="regwall.tests.settings"
Creating test database for alias 'default'...
..
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 2 tests in 0.229s
OK
Destroying test database for alias 'default'...
A bundled settings file allows you to test the code without even creating a Django project.