Change root password

The manage.py provides a changepassword option which allows you to change the password of any given User (django.contrib.auth).

To change the password of the root account:

python manage.py changepassword
Changing password for user 'root'
Password: xxx
Password (again): xxx
Password changed successfully for user 'root'

If you want to change the password for another User:

python manage.py changepassword someuser
Error: user 'someuser' does not exist

UUID

Generating UUID(A Universally Unique IDentifier) example: (only from python 2.5+)

>>> import uuid
>>> unique_id = str(uuid.uuid4())
>>> print unique_id
e31c4c33-2d02-49ef-a501-a9f947f86697
>>>

Reference: http://docs.python.org/library/uuid.html

Writing Django Decorators

I had a situation today where I had to write a custom decorator for a Django app and thought I would post the code.

I first created a file called decorators.py and placed it in the project folder.

from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from django.http import HttpResponse, HttpResponseRedirect

from functools import wraps

def access_required(permission):
    def decorator(func):
        def inner_decorator(request, *args, **kwargs):
            if permission == 'admin':
                if request.session['user_profile'].is_account_admin == 1:
                    return func(request, *args, **kwargs)
                else:
                    return HttpResponseRedirect(reverse('dashboard'))

        return wraps(func)(inner_decorator)

    return decorator

Then in my views I simply imported the decorator and added it to my view:

from webapp.decorators import access_required
@access_required('admin')
    def account_users(request):
        ...

Sending HTML email

It is possible to send a HTML email using the EmailMultiAlternatives

Example:

from django.core.mail import EmailMultiAlternatives
from django.template.loader import render_to_string
from django.utils.html import strip_tags

subject, from_email, to = 'Order Confirmation', 'admin@yourdomain.com', 'someone@somewhere.com'

html_content = render_to_string('the_template.html', {'varname':'value'}) # ...
text_content = strip_tags(html_content) # this strips the html, so people will have the text as well.

# create the email, and attach the HTML version as well.
msg = EmailMultiAlternatives(subject, text_content, from_email, [to])
msg.attach_alternative(html_content, "text/html")
msg.send()

render_to_string

The render_to_string is similar to render_to_response but instead of sending the data to the response object it just saves the result as a string object.
This can be then used as normal string.

Example:

from django.template.loader import render_to_string
response = render_to_string('the_template.html', { 'varname': 'value' })

Be carefull, you CAN NOT do the following:

from django.template.loader import render_to_string
def my_view(request):
    ...
    return render_to_string('the_template.html', { 'varname': 'value' }) # CRASH...!

But you CAN DO this instead:

from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.template.loader import render_to_string
def my_view(request):
    ...
    return HttpResponse( render_to_string('the_template.html', { 'varname': 'value' }) )