django-auditlog documentation¶

Adding Auditlog to your Django application¶

To use Auditlog in your application, just add 'auditlog' to your project’s INSTALLED_APPS setting and run manage.py migrate to create/upgrade the necessary database structure.

If you want Auditlog to automatically set the actor for log entries you also need to enable the middleware by adding 'auditlog.middleware.AuditlogMiddleware' to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES setting. Please check Usage for more information.

Manually logging changes¶

Auditlog log entries are simple LogEntry model instances. This makes creating a new log entry very easy. For even more convenience, LogEntryManager provides a number of methods which take some work out of your hands.

See Internals for all details.

Automatically logging changes¶

Auditlog can automatically log changes to objects for you. This functionality is based on Django’s signals, but linking your models to Auditlog is even easier than using signals.

Registering your model for logging can be done with a single line of code, as the following example illustrates:

from auditlog.registry import auditlog
from django.db import models

class MyModel(models.Model):
    pass
    # Model definition goes here

auditlog.register(MyModel)

It is recommended to place the register code (auditlog.register(MyModel)) at the bottom of your models.py file. This ensures that every time your model is imported it will also be registered to log changes. Auditlog makes sure that each model is only registered once, otherwise duplicate log entries would occur.

Excluding fields

Fields that are excluded will not trigger saving a new log entry and will not show up in the recorded changes.

To exclude specific fields from the log you can pass include_fields resp. exclude_fields to the register method. If exclude_fields is specified the fields with the given names will not be included in the generated log entries. If include_fields is specified only the fields with the given names will be included in the generated log entries. Explicitly excluding fields through exclude_fields takes precedence over specifying which fields to include.

For example, to exclude the field last_updated, use:

auditlog.register(MyModel, exclude_fields=['last_updated'])

Actors¶

When using automatic logging, the actor is empty by default. However, auditlog can set the actor from the current request automatically. This does not need any custom code, adding a middleware class is enough. When an actor is logged the remote address of that actor will be logged as well.

To enable the automatic logging of the actors, simply add the following to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES setting in your project’s configuration file:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    # Request altering middleware, e.g., Django's default middleware classes
    'auditlog.middleware.AuditlogMiddleware',
    # Other middleware
)

It is recommended to keep all middleware that alters the request loaded before Auditlog’s middleware.

Object history¶

Auditlog ships with a custom field that enables you to easily get the log entries that are relevant to your object. This functionality is built on Django’s content types framework (django.contrib.contenttypes). Using this field in your models is equally easy as any other field:

from auditlog.models import AuditlogHistoryField
from auditlog.registry import auditlog
from django.db import models

class MyModel(models.Model):
    history = AuditlogHistoryField()
    # Model definition goes here

auditlog.register(MyModel)

AuditlogHistoryField accepts an optional pk_indexable parameter, which is either True or False, this defaults to True. If your model has a custom primary key that is not an integer value, pk_indexable needs to be set to False. Keep in mind that this might slow down queries.

Many-to-many relationships¶

By default, many-to-many relationships are not tracked by Auditlog.

The history for a many-to-many relationship without an explicit ‘through’ model can be recorded by registering this model as follows:

auditlog.register(MyModel.related.through)

The log entries for all instances of the ‘through’ model that are related to a MyModel instance can be retrieved with the LogEntryManager.get_for_objects() method. The resulting QuerySet can be combined with any other queryset of LogEntry instances. This way it is possible to get a list of all changes on an object and its related objects:

obj = MyModel.objects.first()
rel_history = LogEntry.objects.get_for_objects(obj.related.all())
full_history = (obj.history.all() | rel_history.all()).order_by('-timestamp')

Models and fields¶

Middleware¶

Signal receivers¶

Calculating changes¶

auditlog.diff.get_fields_in_model(instance)[source]¶

Returns the list of fields in the given model instance. Checks whether to use the official _meta API or use the raw data. This method excludes many to many fields.

Parameters:	instance (Model) – The model instance to get the fields for
Returns:	The list of fields for the given model (instance)
Return type:	list

auditlog.diff.model_instance_diff(old, new)[source]¶

Calculates the differences between two model instances. One of the instances may be None (i.e., a newly created model or deleted model). This will cause all fields with a value to have changed (from None).

Parameters:	old (Model) – The old state of the model instance. new (Model) – The new state of the model instance.
Returns:	A dictionary with the names of the changed fields as keys and a two tuple of the old and new field values as value.
Return type:	dict

auditlog.diff.track_field(field)[source]¶

Returns whether the given field should be tracked by Auditlog.

Untracked fields are many-to-many relations and relations to the Auditlog LogEntry model.

Parameters:	field (Field) – The field to check.
Returns:	Whether the given field should be tracked.
Return type:	bool

Registry¶