Django Snailtracker

Introduction

Django Snailtracker is used to keep track of the history of individual records in your database. It will track updates, deletes and inserts and keep a diff of those records, when they changed and, if setup, who changed them.

Installation

For more automatic installation of snailtracker, use pypi and pip. pip install django-snailtracker

For a manual installation, you can clone the snailtracker repo and install it using python and setup.py.

git clone git://github.com/aquameta/django-snailtracker.git
python setup.py install

Configuration

Snailtracker is just a Django app. Drop it into your INSTALLED_APPS tuple.

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'django_snailtracker',
    ...
)

You also need to enable snailtracker by adding the following to your settings.py:

SNAILTRACKER_ENABLED = True

If you use Celery, you can offload the creation of snailtracker action objects by enabling the following (this is recommended for applications that write a lot of data to the database):

SNAILTRACKER_OFFLOAD = True

Sync your database...

python manage.py syncdb [--database=snailtracker]

Then migrate if you use South:

python manage.py migrate django_snailtracker

Usage

Registering models to be tracked by Snailtracker is a lot like registering models to be used in the Django Admin. Start by creating a snailtracker.py file in each app where you have models that you want to track.

The snailtracker.py file for a blog app would look like this:

import django_snailtracker.utils

from project.blogs.models import Blog, Post, Tag, Comment

django_snailtracker.utils.register(Blog)
django_snailtracker.utils.register(Post)
django_snailtracker.utils.register(Tag)
django_snailtracker.utils.register(Comment)

You'll also have to tell django to go find the files. Snailtracker has an autodiscover() utility to do this. Typically this will be in your main urls.py file:

from django_snailtracker import autodiscover

autodiscover()