Welcome to django-vanityurls’s documentation!

Django VanityURLs is a Django app which helps the user to create vanity URLs for pages on their site via the Django admin.

By way of an example, if your website has a lengthy URL, say example.org/complicated/path/to/page?page=1234, which you wish to share with the public, you can set up example.org/niceurl for convenience and memorability.

How It Works

django-vanityurls works via a Django middleware. The middleware intercepts the HTTP response once your views have executed. In the event of a 404 (page not found) error response, the middleware attempts to find a VanityUrl model object matching the requested path. If a match is found, a 301 permanent redirect is issued, directing the client to the longer, canonical URL.

In this way, django-vanityurls will only query the database in the event of a 404, rather than on every request. This also means that it requires minimal configuration: for example, your urls.py need not be modified at all.

Installation

Download

The preferred way to get hold of django-vanityurls is via pip:

$ pip install django-vanityurls

This may be a good time to add django-vanityurls to your project’s requirements.txt.

The django-vanityurls source code is also available via the project’s GitHub repository.

Initial Configuration

There are two changes to make to your project’s settings.py:

  1. add the app to INSTALLED_APPS:

    INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'vanityurls',
    ...
]

  2. enable the django-vanityurls middleware by adding the following entry to MIDDLEWARE:

    MIDDLEWARE = [
    ...
    'vanityurls.middleware.VanityUrlsMiddleware',
    ...
]

Database Migration

Apply the database migration to create the table needed by django-vanityurls:

$ python manage.py migrate vanityurls

You should now be good to go, and should have a VANITYURLS section in Django admin.

See Also