Mozilla Product Details for Django

Product Details is a public JSON API and a repository containing information about the latest versions, localizations, etc. of Mozilla products (most notably Firefox, Firefox for mobile, and Thunderbird).

From the original README file:

Product Details is a public JSON API which contains release information
for Firefox (desktop and mobile) and Thunderbird. The data is managed by
the Release Management team through Ship-it and exported available at
this domain:

- https://product-details.mozilla.org/

Examples of data and files provided are listed on Product-Details wiki.

This is a Django app allowing this data to be used in Django projects. A Django management command can be used as a cron job or called manually to keep the data in sync with Mozilla.

Why?

The data provided by this API is meant to be the source of truth for all tools needing to know specific information about a Firefox release or channel.

Historically that data was managed with direct commits into a code repository on the Mozilla SVN server. The current version 1.0 of the API is meant to be fully compatible with the version previously hosted on SVN. The data source of Mozilla Product Details from the git repository is published to product-details.mozilla.org.

For Django projects, this app manages updates and caching of the data, and turns the JSON data into Python objects.

Getting Started

Installing

Install this library using pip:

pip install django-mozilla-product-details

... or by downloading the product_details directory and dropping it into your django project.

Add product_details to your INSTALLED_APPS to enable the management commands.

Configuration

No configuration should be necessary. However, you can add the following settings to your settings.py file if you disagree with the defaults:

• PROD_DETAILS_URL defaults to the JSON API root on product-details.mozilla.org. If you have a secondary mirror at hand, or you want this tool to download completely unrelated JSON files from somewhere else, adjust this setting. Include a trailing slash.
• PROD_DETAILS_DIR is the target directory for the JSON files. It needs to be writable by the user that'll execute the management command, and readable by the user running the Django project. Defaults to: .../install_dir_of_this_app/product_details/json/ (only for use with PDFileStorage backend (see below)).

You can further decide where the JSON data should be stored by using a storage backend class. There are 2 provided in the app currently, but it should be easy to create a subclass of product_details.storage.ProductDetailsStorage and store them wherever you like. The two provided are for the filesystem (the default) and the database. To configure which backend it uses set the following:

• PROD_DETAILS_STORAGE a string of the dotted path to a storage class (like in MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES). Available classes included with the app are product_details.storage.PDFileStorage (default) and product_details.storage.PDDatabaseStorage. To use the database storage class you should run migrations (./manage.py migrate) which will create the database table required to store the data and populate the table with the JSON data included with the library (or the data in the configured data directory). You can then keep the data updated via the update_product_details management command just like normal.

This app uses Django's cache framework to store the product data so that the data can be updated on the site without requiring a server restart. The following settings will allow you to control how this works.

• PROD_DETAILS_CACHE_NAME defaults to the cache in your CACHES setting called default (django provides an in-memory cache here by default). If you provide a name of a cache configured in the Django configuration CACHES, it will use that cache to store the file data instead.
• PROD_DETAILS_CACHE_TIMEOUT If set to an integer, it represents the number of seconds the cached data should be kept per file. Defaults to 12 hours.

Updating the feed

To update the data, execute this:

./manage.py update_product_details

You want to run this once manually after installing the app. To periodically pull in new data, you can make this a cron job.

Note: Please be considerate of the server when adding a cron job. The data does not change often enough to warrant an update every minute or so. Most applications will run perfectly fine if you pull new data once a day or even less frequently. When in doubt, contact the author of this library.

Using the data

To use the data, just import the library:

from product_details import product_details

The library turns all imported JSON files automatically into Python objects. The contents are perhaps best inspected using IPython.

Version Compare

Product details comes with an implementation of version comparison code for Mozilla-style product versions. Use it like this:

>>> from product_details.version_compare import Version
>>> v1 = Version('4.0b10')
>>> v2 = Version('4.0b10pre')
>>> v1 < v2
False

The second useful part of the version compare code is generating a list of unique versions, sorted by their release date, like this:

>>> from product_details import product_details
>>> from product_details.version_compare import version_list
>>> version_list(product_details.firefox_history_development_releases)
['3.6.4', '3.6.3', '3.6', '3.6b5', '3.6b4', '3.6b3', '3.6b2', ... ]

Caveats / Known Issues

1. While the management task will not overwrite existing files if the server returns bogus data (i.e., an empty document or unparseable JSON data), this library will also never delete a JSON file that was completely removed from the server. This is unlikely to happen very often, though.

2. You don't want to import product_details in settings.py as that would cause an import loop (since product_details itself imports django.conf.settings). However, if you must, you can lazily wrap the import like this, mitigating the problem:

   from django.utils.functional import lazy
   
   MY_LANGUAGES = ('en-US', 'de')
   class LazyLangs(list):
       def __new__(self):
           from product_details import product_details
           return [(lang.lower(), product_details.languages[lang]['native'])
                   for lang in MY_LANGUAGES]
   LANGUAGES = lazy(LazyLangs, list)()
   

3. Using product_details before Django has finished initializing, e.g. in your app's __init__.py it may raise a django.core.exceptions.AppRegistryNotReady exception. The lazy loading example from above should help you overcome this issue.

Development

Patches are welcome.

To run tests, install tox and run tox from the project root. This will run the tests in Python 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9 against various appropriate Django versions. If you don't have tox and/or all the versions of Python available, install nose, mock, requests, responses and Django (see tox.ini's deps) and run the tests in your current Python version by running ./runtests.py.

Releasing

1. Update the version number in product_details/__init__.py.
2. Add an entry to the change log in the README file.
3. Tag the commit where you changed the above with the version number: e.g. 1.0.4.
4. Push the commit and tag to the github repo.
5. Create a new GitHub release, selecting the tag you just pushed to specify the commit. Hit Publish.
6. Github will build and release the package to PyPI. Monitor the progress via the Actions tab.

Note, if you need to manually build a release on your local machine, be sure to run python updatejson.py before you run python -m build . so that the JSON data files are definitely included in the artifacts you generate.

Change Log

1.0.3 - 2022-03-08

• Previous release(s) did not contain product-details data. This release does include a copy of the data.

1.0.2 - 2022-01-31

• Move CI to Github Actions. Thanks stevejalim!

1.0.1 - 2022-01-13

• Updates to be able to handle Firefox versions over 100. Thanks robhudson!

1.0.0 - 2022-01-07

• Drop Python 2 support.
• Covert codebase to use black formatting.
• Update the tox testing configuration to add new Django and Python releases.

Thanks to stevejalim and tasos for these improvements.

0.14.1 - 2019-06-03

• Add back last-modified data for directory lists in the data to avoid migration failure.

0.14 - 2019-05-28

• Remove the last-modified check for directory lists. Fixes #72. Thanks pmac!

0.13.1 - 2019-03-03

• Tweak a migration to make Django 2+ under Python 3 happy. Fixes #68. Thanks peterbe!

0.13 - 2017-08-30

• Lazily load the storage class to avoid import issues in Django 1.9+. Thanks Giorgos!

0.12.1 - 2016-08-18

• Add --database option to management command to allow data to be updated in a configured database other than "default".

0.12 - 2016-07-29

• Update caching strategy to cache all files in a single cache entry. The file contents are interdependent, so caching separately caused errors when timeouts were staggered.
• Change the default data URL to https://product-details.mozilla.org/1.0/ (bug 1282494).

0.11.1 - 2016-04-08

• Include updated JSON data in the release. A problem with deployment in Travis resulted in 0.11 failing to include the data.

0.11 - 2016-04-08

• Wrap the update of JSON data in a transaction when using the database storage backend (bug 1254664).
• Avoid caching empty data (bug 1254664).

Thanks to jgmize for both of these improvements!

0.10 - 2016-01-25

• Use requests lib to fetch remote data for reliability and better Py3k compatibility.
• Update management command to avoid Django 1.9 deprecation warnings. Django 1.8 is now the minimum supported version.

Thanks to Osmose for both of these improvements!

0.9 - 2015-12-28

• Support for Python 3 and 2 simultaneously! Also provide a universal wheel package.
• Support for Django 1.9. Thanks Osmose!

0.8.2 - 2015-12-22

• Use HTTPS by default to fetch JSON data. Thanks jvehent!
• Fix product_details.last_update property. It's been broken since 0.8. Thanks for the report diox!

0.8.1 - 2015-10-07

• Add a data migration that will import the included JSON file data into the database table upon creation.

0.8 - 2015-09-30

• Add configurable json data file storage backends.
• Add filesystem and database backends.

0.7.1 - 2015-06-15

• Do not cache a file miss.
• Catch an attempt to parse a non-JSON or corrupt file.

0.7 - 2015-05-22

• Use the Django cache framework to store product data, allowing data to be updated without a server restart.
• Add and update tests, setup tox for testing across Python and Django versions, and setup Travis for CI.

0.6 - 2015-05-08

• Initial PyPI release. Prior to this it was released and installed via github.