noahsilas/jaktivity

Django Activity Logger

Jaktivity

Jaktivity is a django app to log activity on a django powered website.

Dependencies

• Django 1.3+

Installing Jaktivity

• Put jaktivity on your python path
• Add jaktivity to INSTALLED_APPS in your settings
• syncdb (or run migrations if you are using south)
• Add jaktivity.middleware.ActivityLogMiddleware to MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES in your settings

Adding a web view for the activity logs

• Add jaktivity to your urls patterns += ('', (r'^activity/', include('jaktivity.urls', namespace='jaktivity')),) Sample templates are available in the sample_templates directory.

Using Jaktivity

What gets logged

For HTTP requests that are 'unsafe' (not having HTTP method GET or HEAD):

• date
• remote IP Address
• django auth username (if logged in with django.contrib.auth)
• request method
• request host
• request path
• python path of the view resolved to
• args passed to the view
• response status code (if not 500)
• exception type (if 500)

Human Readable Messages

A view can set a human readable message onto its log entry: def view(request): if request.method == 'POST': request.log.message = 'Edited a widget'

If you want to add messages to views from third party apps, you can simply add a log_message attribute to the view. from django.contrib.auth.views import login login.log_message = 'Logged In'

You can also specify a callable object instead of a string; Jaktivity will call it with the same arguments as the view and assign the result of the callable to the message.

Log Notes

Log entries may have multiple notes attached to them. You can add a note to a log anytime: def view(request): for item in request.POST.getlist('values'): request.log.note("Adding item %s" % item)

Customizing Jaktivity

Safe Methods

By default Jaktivity will not log requests with an HTTP method of GET or HEAD. You can adjust what methods jactivity considers 'safe' (meaning they will not be logged) by setting ACTIVITY_SAFE_METHODS in your settings. For instance, if you do not want to log requests with a DELETE method, set the following: JAKTIVITY_SAFE_METHODS = ('GET', 'HEAD', 'DELETE')

Per-View overrides

You may override the SAFE_METHODS by marking individual views as always_log or never_log: def view(request): return HttpResponse() view.always_log = True

Saving HTTP Headers

By default, Jaktivity does not save any of the HTTP Headers. You may specify which headers you would like to save with the ACTIVITY_SAVE_HEADERS setting.

Example: to save User-Agent strings, add the following to your settings: JAKTIVITY_SAVE_HEADERS = ('HTTP_USER_AGENT',)

Saving HTTP Parameters

Jaktivity records all HTTP parameters, unless they are named any of the following:

• csrfmiddlewaretoken
• password

You may override this list with the JAKTIVITY_IGNORE_PARAMS setting.

Author

Noah Silas ([email protected])