dynamicsiteslite

Original dynamicsites By UYSRC http://www.uysrc.com/

Host multiple sites from a single django project

Expands the standard django.contrib.sites package to allow for:

• Sites identified dynamically from the request via middleware
• No need for multiple virtual hosts at the webserver level
• 301 Redirects to canonical hostnames
• A site may have its own urls.py and templates
• Allows for environment hostname mappings to use non-production hostnames (for use in dev, staging, test, etc. environments)

Configuration

1. Before you install dynamicsites, make sure you have configured at least 1 site in the admin panel, because once dynamicsites is installed, it will try to lookup a site from request.get_host(), and, if none exists, will always throw 404

2. Add the app to INSTALLED_APPS ::

   INSTALLED_APPS = (
       ...
       'dynamicsiteslite',
   )
   

3. Add the middleware to MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES ::

   MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
       ...
       'dynamicsiteslite.middleware.DynamicSitesMiddleware'
   )
   

4. Add the context processor to TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS ::

   TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
       ...
       'dynamicsiteslite.context_processors.current_site',
   )
   

5. Configure dynamicsites by adding SITES_DIR, SITES_PACKAGE, DEFAULT_HOST, and HOSTNAME_REDIRECTS to settings.py ::

   SITES_DIR = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'sites')
   SITES_PACKAGE = 'sites'
   DEFAULT_HOST = 'www.your-default-site.com'
   HOSTNAME_REDIRECTS = {
   #    'redirect-src-1.com':         'www.redirect-dest-1.com',
       ...
   }
   

6. If your local environment (eg. test, dev, staging) uses different hostnames than production, set the ENV_HOSTNAMES map as well ::

   ENV_HOSTNAMES = {
       'my-site.dev':    'www.your-default-site.com',
       ...
   }
   

7. make sites dir (from the SITES_DIR setting above) and put a __init__.py file inside

8. make a site dir for each site you're hosting (eg. mkdir sites/www_mysitesdomain_com) <-- put underscores instead of dots in the domain name, these need to be imported as python packages. Make sure to put an __init__.py file in each site dir as well.

9. add a SITES_FILTER setting if you want to restrict the sites served by this project. SITES_FILTER is a dict used as follows when dynamicsiteslite looks up sites in the database::

   Site.objects.filter(**SITES_FILTER)
   

Debugging

In the current codebase, if you have the django debug toolba unstalled and enable redirect tracking, ie.

::

DEBUG_TOOLBAR_CONFIG = {
    'INTERCEPT_REDIRECTS': True,
}

django-dynamicsites will intercept redirects, which is very helpful when dialing in your site config.

There's also a view included with the codebase which is useful for checking which site dynamicsites thinks you're seeing. Just add an entry to your urls.py file::

from dynamicsiteslite.views import site_info

urlpatterns += patterns('',
    url(r'^site-info$', site_info),)

Notes

• in sites folder, each folder must have a init.py file.

More Info

More info can be found here: http://blog.uysrc.com/2011/03/23/serving-multiple-sites-with-django/