django-auditlog

Please remember that this app is still in development and not yet suitable for production environments.

django-auditlog (Auditlog) is created out of the need for a simple Django app that logs changes to models, including the user that changed the models. Some requirements were that the overhead had to be low and that the app should be able to handle high volumes of log entries. Full-blown version control (with functionalities like reverting changes) was not needed, and would cause too much overhead. After looking for some time I did not find an app like that.

Auditlog provides a log of changes made to a model instance. It also saves the user that made the changes (only when changes were made in a request). Unlike the log from Django's admin (django.contrib.admin) Auditlog also saves a summary of the changes in JSON format, so changes can be tracked easily and the right people can be blamed for unwanted changes.

Installation

Auditlog is not yet on Pypi, but will be there once I find it stable enough.

The current recommended installation is to clone the git repository (or download the zipped files) and copy the src/auditlog directory into your Django project.

You can enable Auditlog by simply adding 'auditlog' to your INSTALLED_APPS setting in your project's settings.py file.

If you want your log entries to automatically contain the actor, you also need to add 'auditlog.middleware.AuditLogMiddleware' to the MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES setting in the same file.

Usage

For the features below to work, you need to add the following imports to the top of the models.py file.

from auditlog.models import AuditLogHistoryField
from auditlog.registry import auditlog

Before Auditlog logs mutations on model instances, each model must be registered. This can be done by adding the following line of code to the models.py file (below the model itself). Change MyModel to the model you want to register.

auditlog.register(MyModel)

It is possible to have a model instances history directly available through a custom field. For this, you can add the following code to a subclass of models.Model:

history = AuditLogHistoryField()

Note that use of the field is not required for Auditlog to work, it is just a shortcut to get the log entries easier. Also, registering the model is not required for the field to work. This allows you to keep access to log entries once logging is no longer needed and you can add it to an abstract model without implicitly registering all subclasses of that model for logging.

License

Auditlog is licensed under the MIT license (see the LICENSE file for details).

Contribute

If you have great ideas for Auditlog, or if you like to improve something, feel free to fork this repository and/or create a pull request. I'm open for suggestions. If you like to discuss something with me (about Auditlog), please open an issue.