Django admin error messages

Not sure whether this was fixed in newer django versions (I found the behaviour you described in django 1.2.1 and also in django-grappelli 2.0), but if you use Bartek’s method above, you’d also probably want to change the admin templates to show the messages differently. Specifically in base.html:

Change this:

{% if messages %}
        <ul class="messagelist">{% for message in messages %}<li>{{ message }}</li>{% endfor %}</ul>
    {% endif %}

to this:

{% if messages %}
        <ul class="messagelist">{% for message in messages %}<li{% if message.tags %} class="{{ message.tags }}"{% endif %}>{{ message}}</li>{% endfor %}</ul>
    {% endif %}

You might still need to tweak some CSS on top of that too, but at least it would come up as a different li class on the HTML.

Here’s a sample CSS change (compatible with grappelli)

ul.messagelist li.error {
background: url('../img/icons/icon-no.png') 20px 50% no-repeat;
background-color: #f2e6e6;

}

answered Apr 11, 2011 at 14:10

Server errors¶

When DEBUG is False, Django will email the users listed in the
ADMINS setting whenever your code raises an unhandled exception and
results in an internal server error (strictly speaking, for any response with
an HTTP status code of 500 or greater). This gives the administrators immediate
notification of any errors. The ADMINS will get a description of the
error, a complete Python traceback, and details about the HTTP request that
caused the error.

By default, Django will send email from root@localhost. However, some mail
providers reject all email from this address. To use a different sender
address, modify the SERVER_EMAIL setting.

To activate this behavior, put the email addresses of the recipients in the
ADMINS setting.

404 errors¶

Django can also be configured to email errors about broken links (404 “page
not found” errors). Django sends emails about 404 errors when:

• DEBUG is False;
• Your MIDDLEWARE setting includes
  django.middleware.common.BrokenLinkEmailsMiddleware.

If those conditions are met, Django will email the users listed in the
MANAGERS setting whenever your code raises a 404 and the request has
a referer. It doesn’t bother to email for 404s that don’t have a referer –
those are usually people typing in broken URLs or broken web bots. It also
ignores 404s when the referer is equal to the requested URL, since this
behavior is from broken web bots too.

You can tell Django to stop reporting particular 404s by tweaking the
IGNORABLE_404_URLS setting. It should be a list of compiled
regular expression objects. For example:

import re
IGNORABLE_404_URLS = [
    re.compile(r'.(php|cgi)$'),
    re.compile(r'^/phpmyadmin/'),
]

In this example, a 404 to any URL ending with .php or .cgi will not be
reported. Neither will any URL starting with /phpmyadmin/.

The following example shows how to exclude some conventional URLs that browsers and
crawlers often request:

import re
IGNORABLE_404_URLS = [
    re.compile(r'^/apple-touch-icon.*.png$'),
    re.compile(r'^/favicon.ico$'),
    re.compile(r'^/robots.txt$'),
]

(Note that these are regular expressions, so we put a backslash in front of
periods to escape them.)

If you’d like to customize the behavior of
django.middleware.common.BrokenLinkEmailsMiddleware further (for
example to ignore requests coming from web crawlers), you should subclass it
and override its methods.

Warning

Filtering sensitive data is a hard problem, and it’s nearly impossible to
guarantee that sensitive data won’t leak into an error report. Therefore,
error reports should only be available to trusted team members and you
should avoid transmitting error reports unencrypted over the internet
(such as through email).

Filtering sensitive information¶

Error reports are really helpful for debugging errors, so it is generally
useful to record as much relevant information about those errors as possible.
For example, by default Django records the full traceback for the
exception raised, each traceback frame’s local variables, and the
HttpRequest’s attributes.

However, sometimes certain types of information may be too sensitive and thus
may not be appropriate to be kept track of, for example a user’s password or
credit card number. So in addition to filtering out settings that appear to be
sensitive as described in the DEBUG documentation, Django offers a
set of function decorators to help you control which information should be
filtered out of error reports in a production environment (that is, where
DEBUG is set to False): sensitive_variables() and
sensitive_post_parameters().

sensitive_variables(*variables)¶

If a function (either a view or any regular callback) in your code uses
local variables susceptible to contain sensitive information, you may
prevent the values of those variables from being included in error reports
using the sensitive_variables decorator:

from django.views.decorators.debug import sensitive_variables

@sensitive_variables('user', 'pw', 'cc')
def process_info(user):
    pw = user.pass_word
    cc = user.credit_card_number
    name = user.name
    ...

In the above example, the values for the user, pw and cc
variables will be hidden and replaced with stars (**********)
in the error reports, whereas the value of the name variable will be
disclosed.

To systematically hide all local variables of a function from error logs,
do not provide any argument to the sensitive_variables decorator:

@sensitive_variables()
def my_function():
    ...

When using multiple decorators

If the variable you want to hide is also a function argument (e.g.
‘user’ in the following example), and if the decorated function has
multiple decorators, then make sure to place @sensitive_variables
at the top of the decorator chain. This way it will also hide the
function argument as it gets passed through the other decorators:

@sensitive_variables('user', 'pw', 'cc')
@some_decorator
@another_decorator
def process_info(user):
    ...

sensitive_post_parameters(*parameters)¶

If one of your views receives an HttpRequest object
with POST parameters susceptible to
contain sensitive information, you may prevent the values of those
parameters from being included in the error reports using the
sensitive_post_parameters decorator:

from django.views.decorators.debug import sensitive_post_parameters

@sensitive_post_parameters('pass_word', 'credit_card_number')
def record_user_profile(request):
    UserProfile.create(
        user=request.user,
        password=request.POST['pass_word'],
        credit_card=request.POST['credit_card_number'],
        name=request.POST['name'],
    )
    ...

In the above example, the values for the pass_word and
credit_card_number POST parameters will be hidden and replaced with
stars (**********) in the request’s representation inside the
error reports, whereas the value of the name parameter will be
disclosed.

To systematically hide all POST parameters of a request in error reports,
do not provide any argument to the sensitive_post_parameters decorator:

@sensitive_post_parameters()
def my_view(request):
    ...

All POST parameters are systematically filtered out of error reports for
certain django.contrib.auth.views views (login,
password_reset_confirm, password_change, and add_view and
user_change_password in the auth admin) to prevent the leaking of
sensitive information such as user passwords.

Custom error reports¶

All sensitive_variables() and sensitive_post_parameters() do is,
respectively, annotate the decorated function with the names of sensitive
variables and annotate the HttpRequest object with the names of sensitive
POST parameters, so that this sensitive information can later be filtered out
of reports when an error occurs. The actual filtering is done by Django’s
default error reporter filter:
django.views.debug.SafeExceptionReporterFilter. This filter uses the
decorators’ annotations to replace the corresponding values with stars
(**********) when the error reports are produced. If you wish to
override or customize this default behavior for your entire site, you need to
define your own filter class and tell Django to use it via the
DEFAULT_EXCEPTION_REPORTER_FILTER setting:

DEFAULT_EXCEPTION_REPORTER_FILTER = 'path.to.your.CustomExceptionReporterFilter'

You may also control in a more granular way which filter to use within any
given view by setting the HttpRequest’s exception_reporter_filter
attribute:

def my_view(request):
    if request.user.is_authenticated:
        request.exception_reporter_filter = CustomExceptionReporterFilter()
    ...

Your custom filter class needs to inherit from
django.views.debug.SafeExceptionReporterFilter and may override the
following attributes and methods:

class SafeExceptionReporterFilter¶

cleansed_substitute¶

The string value to replace sensitive value with. By default it
replaces the values of sensitive variables with stars
(**********).

hidden_settings¶

A compiled regular expression object used to match settings and
request.META values considered as sensitive. By default equivalent
to:

import re

re.compile(r'API|TOKEN|KEY|SECRET|PASS|SIGNATURE', flags=re.IGNORECASE)

is_active(request)¶

Returns True to activate the filtering in
get_post_parameters() and get_traceback_frame_variables().
By default the filter is active if DEBUG is False. Note
that sensitive request.META values are always filtered along with
sensitive setting values, as described in the DEBUG
documentation.

get_post_parameters(request)¶

Returns the filtered dictionary of POST parameters. Sensitive values
are replaced with cleansed_substitute.

get_traceback_frame_variables(request, tb_frame)¶

Returns the filtered dictionary of local variables for the given
traceback frame. Sensitive values are replaced with
cleansed_substitute.

If you need to customize error reports beyond filtering you may specify a
custom error reporter class by defining the
DEFAULT_EXCEPTION_REPORTER setting:

DEFAULT_EXCEPTION_REPORTER = 'path.to.your.CustomExceptionReporter'

The exception reporter is responsible for compiling the exception report data,
and formatting it as text or HTML appropriately. (The exception reporter uses
DEFAULT_EXCEPTION_REPORTER_FILTER when preparing the exception
report data.)

Your custom reporter class needs to inherit from
django.views.debug.ExceptionReporter.

class ExceptionReporter¶

html_template_path¶

Property that returns a pathlib.Path representing the absolute
filesystem path to a template for rendering the HTML representation of
the exception. Defaults to the Django provided template.

text_template_path¶

Property that returns a pathlib.Path representing the absolute
filesystem path to a template for rendering the plain-text
representation of the exception. Defaults to the Django provided
template.

get_traceback_data()¶

Return a dictionary containing traceback information.

This is the main extension point for customizing exception reports, for
example:

from django.views.debug import ExceptionReporter


class CustomExceptionReporter(ExceptionReporter):
    def get_traceback_data(self):
        data = super().get_traceback_data()
        # ... remove/add something here ...
        return data

get_traceback_html()¶

Return HTML version of exception report.

Used for HTML version of debug 500 HTTP error page.

get_traceback_text()¶

Return plain text version of exception report.

Used for plain text version of debug 500 HTTP error page and email
reports.

As with the filter class, you may control which exception reporter class to use
within any given view by setting the HttpRequest’s
exception_reporter_class attribute:

def my_view(request):
    if request.user.is_authenticated:
        request.exception_reporter_class = CustomExceptionReporter()
    ...

MESSAGE_STORAGE = 'django.contrib.messages.storage.cookie.CookieStorage'

from django.contrib import messages
messages.add_message(request, messages.INFO, 'Hello world.')

messages.debug(request, '%s SQL statements were executed.' % count)
messages.info(request, 'Three credits remain in your account.')
messages.success(request, 'Profile details updated.')
messages.warning(request, 'Your account expires in three days.')
messages.error(request, 'Document deleted.')

{% if messages %}
<ul class="messages">
    {% for message in messages %}
    <li{% if message.tags %} class="{{ message.tags }}"{% endif %}>{{ message }}</li>
    {% endfor %}
</ul>
{% endif %}

{% if messages %}
<ul class="messages">
    {% for message in messages %}
    <li{% if message.tags %} class="{{ message.tags }}"{% endif %}>
        {% if message.level == DEFAULT_MESSAGE_LEVELS.ERROR %}Important: {% endif %}
        {{ message }}
    </li>
    {% endfor %}
</ul>
{% endif %}

from django.contrib.messages import get_messages

storage = get_messages(request)
for message in storage:
    do_something_with_the_message(message)

CRITICAL = 50

def my_view(request):
    messages.add_message(request, CRITICAL, 'A serious error occurred.')

Примечание

Если вы создаете приложение многократного использования, рекомендуется использовать только встроенные message levels и не полагаться на какие-либо пользовательские уровни.

from django.contrib import messages

# Change the messages level to ensure the debug message is added.
messages.set_level(request, messages.DEBUG)
messages.debug(request, 'Test message...')

# In another request, record only messages with a level of WARNING and higher
messages.set_level(request, messages.WARNING)
messages.success(request, 'Your profile was updated.') # ignored
messages.warning(request, 'Your account is about to expire.') # recorded

# Set the messages level back to default.
messages.set_level(request, None)

from django.contrib import messages
current_level = messages.get_level(request)

messages.add_message(
    request, messages.SUCCESS, 'Profile details updated.',
    fail_silently=True,
)
messages.info(request, 'Hello world.', fail_silently=True)

Примечание

Установка fail_silently=True только скрывает MessageFailure, которые в противном случае возникли бы, когда рамка сообщений отключена, а человек пытается использовать один из методов семейства add_message. Она не скрывает сбои, которые могут возникнуть по другим причинам.

from django.contrib.messages.views import SuccessMessageMixin
from django.views.generic.edit import CreateView
from myapp.models import Author

class AuthorCreateView(SuccessMessageMixin, CreateView):
    model = Author
    success_url = '/success/'
    success_message = "%(name)s was created successfully"

from django.contrib.messages.views import SuccessMessageMixin
from django.views.generic.edit import CreateView
from myapp.models import ComplicatedModel

class ComplicatedCreateView(SuccessMessageMixin, CreateView):
    model = ComplicatedModel
    success_url = '/success/'
    success_message = "%(calculated_field)s was created successfully"

    def get_success_message(self, cleaned_data):
        return self.success_message % dict(
            cleaned_data,
            calculated_field=self.object.calculated_field,
        )