django-tenant-templates 0.5

Overview

A tenant is a set of application configurations and behaviors that runs alongside other tenants in the same server process.

One of the first challenges when building a multitenant Web app is loading different templates for each tenant without making developers’ lives harder. Django Tenant Templates provies utilities for making templating in Django tenant-aware without getting in the way of normal Django development.

Installation and Usage

Install django-tenant-templates from PyPI:

pip install django-tenant-templates

Add the tenant middleware class to your Django settings:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    ...
    'django_tenant_templates.middleware.TenantMiddleware',
    ...
)

Add one or more of the tenant template loaders. They should be placed before the standard Django loaders:

TEMPLATE_LOADERS = (
    'django_tenant_templates.loaders.TenantFileSystemLoader',
    ...
)

Now all you need to do is set request.tenant_slug somewhere before TenantMiddleware is called, and put your tenant-specific templates in a subdirectory whose name is the value of request.tenant_slug.

After that, all template names will get prefixed with request.tenant_slug and a forward slash. If request.tenant_slug is ‘my_tenant’, ‘customers/customer_list.html’ becomes ‘my_tenant/customers/customer_list.html’.

To fall back to non-tenant template loading, make sure to include other template loaders after the tenant loaders in settings.TEMPLATE_LOADERS.

If you want to explicitly load a non-tenant template, prefix the template name with ‘./’. This allows you to extend a non-tenant template with the same name as the tenant template, which can be useful for things like overriding only part of a base template rather than replacing the whole thing.

Middleware

TRIGGER WARNING: This section contains references to thread locals.

The django_tenant_templates.middleware.TenantMiddleware class is what makes the tenant template loaders work. It looks for request.tenant_slug and places it in thread local storage. The template loaders then use the thread local to figure out where they should look for templates.

How you get the value you assign to request.tenant_slug is up to you, but it should be a valid directory name for whatever filesystem you’re using. For example:

# Middleware that runs before TenantMiddleware
class ExampleMiddleware(object):
    def process_request(self, request):
        # Get the tenant slug from an HTTP header.
        request.tenant_slug = request.META.get('HTTP_X_TENANT_ID', None)

You can change the request attribute TenantMiddleware looks for by using a custom subclass:

class CustomTenantMiddleware(TenantMiddleware):
    slug_attribute_name = 'fart'

Django Tenant Templates’ template loaders would then use the value of request.fart as the tenant slug.

Loaders

Django Tenant Templates provides a few template loaders that correspond to the loaders provided by Django. They all live in the django_tenant_templates.loaders module.

Each loader does essentially the same thing: a tenant slug is prefixed to the template name, then the template is looked up normally. For example, if the tenant slug is ‘my_tenant’, the template name customers/customer_list.html will be translated to my_tenant/customers/customer_list.html.