Installation

• Run setup.py to install the package into your python path.

• Add "output_validator" to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.

• If you have removed "django.template.loaders.app_directories.Loader" from your TEMPLATE_LOADERS, you need to add the 'templates' folder to your TEMPLATE_DIRS setting.

• Insert the middleware "output_validator.middleware.ValidatorMiddleware" near the beginning of the middleware list (which means it will get the the response object after everything else). It must be after every middleware that does post-processing, but mustn't be after GZip, since it can't handle gzipped HTML. ( I just disable the GZip middleware for development)

• Alter your URL conf to include the URLs for the validator. You need this line inserted somewhere:

  (r'^validator/', include('output_validator.urls'))
  

• Add a setting to tell the app where to find the 'validate' executable used for validation. This is a dictionary of mimetypes and corresponding validators, allowing this app to be extended to any other generated content:

  OUTPUT_VALIDATOR_VALIDATORS = {
    'text/html': '/usr/bin/validate',
    'application/xml+xhtml': '/usr/bin/validate',
  }
  

  I usually use a small wrapper for this executable that pops up a message when it fails - the following works for GNOME (if you have the notify-send program installed):

  #!/bin/sh
  validate "$1" || {
      notify-send "Validation failed";
  }
  

• Finally, run the django admin script to set up the database tables:

  ./manage.py --settings="yourproject.settings" syncdb
  

  OR, if you are using South:

  ./manage.py --settings="yourproject.settings" migrate output_validator
  

• Optionally, set the following settings:

  • OUTPUT_VALIDATOR_IGNORE_PATHS - this is a list of path prefixes that will be ignored. For example, if you have the admin at /admin/ you can ignore any errors in the admin with this:

    OUTPUT_VALIDATOR_IGNORE_PATHS = [
        '/admin/',
    ]
    

Usage

When browsing any of your pages in development, all HTML will be validated. If it fails, it will be logged. You can see all failures at 'http://localhost:8000/validator/' (assuming local development and the URL conf suggested above). Use the app to delete old failures once they have been fixed.

Changelog