django-remote-admin

A simple API based implementation of django admin.

There are two components of django remote admin:

• The django admin API server (included in the src/ directory)
• The Backbone/ Handlebars application to provide admin UI (included in the ui/ directory)

django Remote Admin is dependent on django-remote-forms

My djangocon US 2012 talk discusses some aspects of the Remote Admin in context of Remote Forms

Important

• This is a proof of concept implementation for django-remote-forms
• This is not supposed to be a complete replacement for django admin
  • File/ Image upload is not available (working on it)
  • Haven't yet written the code for deletin instances
  • Doesn't take into account form overrides in ModelAdmin classes (mostly because django has a custom ModelAdmin for User model and it's quite annoying)
  • Haven't tested if ModelMultipleChoiceField works (might need some work in forms.js)

License

django-remote-admin is provided under MIT license. Feel free to use, hack and share.

Setup

There are 2 ways of getting the project set up

No separation between API and app space

If you just want to get the application up and running without much hassle, try this.

• Create a virtual environment (or not)

• Install requirements

    pip install -r requirements.txt
  

• Change the JS include line in ui/src/html/index.html to

    <script data-main="/static/src/js/main" src="/static/lib/js/require/2.0.4/require.js"></script>
  

• Sync database

    ./src/manage.py syncdb
  

• Start the built-in django server

    ./src/manage.py runserver
  

• Browse to:

    http://localhost:8000
  

Proper separation between API and app space

The goal of the django Remote Admin is to demonstrate how you can have a completely independent web application that communicates with an API server serving django admin apps/ models/ instances and instance forms

It should be noted that such a web application will still need to run under the same domain that serves the API

To simulate the scenario, do the following:

• Create a virtual environment (or not)

• Install requirements

    pip install -r requirements.txt
  

• Edit your Apache config (on Mac):

    sudo pico /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
  

• Add an Apache config to load the UI:

    <VirtualHost *:80>
        DocumentRoot /Users/username/projects/django-remote-admin/ui/src/html
        Alias /src /Users/username/Projects/django-remote-admin/ui/src
        Alias /lib /Users/username/Projects/django-remote-admin/ui/lib
        <Directory /Users/username/Projects/django-remote-admin/ui>
            Order allow,deny
            Allow from all
        </Directory>
    </VirtualHost>
  

• Sync database

    ./src/manage.py syncdb
  

• Start the built-in django server

    ./src/manage.py runserver
  

• Add the following configuration to proxy API requests to the built-in django server

    <IfModule mod_proxy.c>
        ProxyPreserveHost On
        ProxyPass /adminapi/ http://127.0.0.1:8000/adminapi/
        ProxyPassReverse /adminapi/ http://127.0.0.1:8000/adminapi/
    </IfModule>
  

• Restart your Apache (on Mac)

    sudo /usr/sbin/apachectl restart
  

• Browse to:

    http://localhost