HUD | Enable/Disable Django Apps

This post describes how Django apps in a project can be enabled/disabled via settings. The requirement is to be able to enable/disable Djanga apps with flags. If the app is enabled in the project then it will be loaded, its urls and templates will be available to users. On the other hand if an app is disabled then its templates and urls are not available to the user.

For example in the screenshot below the word cloud app is enabled on the left. The app is available on the navbar and homepage . The deployment to the right does not have the word cloud app enabled. Notice that the templates have adjusted themselves based on configuration.

To prevent Django from loading an app is easy. Just do not add it to the list of INSTALLED_APPS in Django settings. However the root url conf, ROOT_URLCONF will need to be changed accordingly. Again, url references in templates cannot be enabled/disabled using just the INSTALLED_APPS. Editing templates and root url confs to tailor them just for a specific deployment is not recommended. This creates additional effort as that particular deployment will need to be tracked and maintained separately.

A better implementation is to specify whether an app is enabled/not and the project will load appropriately. For each app we need its

a) Switch name: This tells the rest of the project whether the app is enabled or disabled. i.e a flag like wordcloud_enabled to check against. This is particularly useful for templates. 

b) Url regex: This is the base url pattern for the app. For example all urls for articles app will have the "articles/" base pattern as prefix. And the url for posting articles can be https://www.server.com/article/post

c) Urls module: The Python module that holds the app's url patterns. In the above example the url patterns for posting, editing and deleting articles etc are specified in this module.

These 3 details are easily configurable in named tuples as shown.

1) Controlling apps in templates: 

Users should not be able to view or use urls of a disabled app. In order to achieve this templates should know whether an app is disabled. This is made possible using a list of Application tuples and a template context processor. The switches tell the template whether an app is enabled or not. The context that contains the app's state is generated from the Application tuples and made available by a context processor. 

In this solution, so long as the templates are as modular as possible, i.e utilising template hierarchy to separate template fragments, we can enable/disable parts of the user interface. The solution becomes as simple as the following check in a template for the navbar for the ml machine learning application.

Notice that the template uses the flag 'ml_enabled' to check ml app is enabled. Each application needs a flag that describes its state. This flag/label is also configurable.

2) Now comes the root url confs. 

For each enabled application we need the url regex and the urls module for the application. These are added to urlpatterns in root url conf. This is shown below.