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django-url-tracker

The django-url-tracker is meant to be a easy-to-use addition to a website to enhance its SEO. This might seem slightly pointless as Cool URIs don't change. I don't want to argue with that and not changing URL should be the primary goal. In case, a URL is changed for some reason, however, this can reflect badly in terms of SEO as search engines do not appreciate ending up on a 404 page when crawling a known URL. To handle these situations nicely django-url-tracker keeps track of URL changes and when the old URL is called provides a permanent redirect (HTTP 301) or a gone response (HTTP 410) for deleted URLs.

The tracking is aimed at those URLs that are generated based on model fields, e.g. a slug field. To start tracking URL changes for a particular model, you simply have to register the model with url_tracker and everytime a model is changed or deleted, URL changes are recorded.

The HTTP repsonses that provide an HttpResponsePremanentRedirect or HttpResponseGone are handled similar to the flatpages middleware, intercepting 404 exceptions and checking for the requested URLs in all existing URLChangeRecords. Depending on the recorded data the corresponding HTTP response is return or a 404 is raised when no URL matching the requested one can be found.

Installation

Installation is as easy as:

pip install django-url-tracker

Done!

Configuration

To start using url_tracker in your project. Just add the following two lines to your settings.py:

  1. Add the middleware url_tracker.middleware.URLChangePermanentRedirectMiddleware to the end of MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES which should look similar to this afterwards:

    MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.flatpages.middleware.FlatpageFallbackMiddleware',
    'url_tracker.middleware.URLChangePermanentRedirectMiddleware',
)

  2. Add url_tracker to your INSTALLED_APPS

    INSTALLED_APPS = (
     "url_tracker",
)

Now you are able to use url_tracker within you project. All that remains to do is registering a model for tracking.

Tracking A Model

This is just a simple example of how to track a model. Let's assume we have a model Project that hold details on this particular project and is made available at the URL http://www.example.com/project/some-project/. The project's URL is based on the SlugField of our model. The model could look like this:

class Project(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
    slug = models.SlugField(max_length=20)
    description = models.CharField(max_length=500)

I will not go into details of how to create the slug as I think this is common practise. So for now we just assume that slug is populated automatically from name. One other thing, however, is required for the tracker to work, the get_absolute_url method. Let's add this to the model:

class Project(models.Model):
    ...

    @models.permalink
    def get_absolute_url(self):
        return ('project-detail', (), {'slug': self.slug})

And now the missing link to actually start tracking URL changes is adding the following command to the bottom of the class definition, or the file for that matter:

import url_tracker
url_tracker.track_url_changes_for_model(Project)

You are done. If you go to the admin interface, create a new project and then change its slug (which changes its URL) you will see a new URLChangeRecord reflecting the change. Opening the old_url should then redirect you to the new_url.

Contributing

If you find issues or would like to see a feature suppored, head over to the issues section: and report it.

To contribute code in any form, fork the github repository: and clone it locally. Create a new branch for your feature:

git commit -b feature/whatever-you-like

push the finished feature to github and open a pull request form the branch.