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The Django admin documentation generator¶
Django’s admindocs
app pulls documentation from the
docstrings of models, views, template tags, and template filters for any app in
INSTALLED_APPS
and makes that documentation available from the
Django admin
.
You may, to some extent, utilize admindocs
to quickly
document your own code. This has limited usage, however, as the app is
primarily intended for documenting templates, template tags, and filters.
For example, model methods that require arguments are purposefully omitted
from the documentation because they can’t be invoked from templates. The app
can still be useful since it doesn’t require you to write any extra
documentation (besides docstrings) and is conveniently available from the
Django admin
.
Overview¶
To activate the admindocs
, you will need to do
the following:
- Add
django.contrib.admindocs
to yourINSTALLED_APPS
. - Add
url(r'^admin/doc/', include('django.contrib.admindocs.urls'))
to yoururlpatterns
. Make sure it’s included before ther'^admin/'
entry, so that requests to/admin/doc/
don’t get handled by the latter entry. - Install the docutils Python module (http://docutils.sf.net/).
- Optional: Using the admindocs bookmarklets requires
django.contrib.admindocs.middleware.XViewMiddleware
to be installed.
Once those steps are complete, you can start browsing the documentation by going to your admin interface and clicking the “Documentation” link in the upper right of the page.
Documentation helpers¶
The following special markup can be used in your docstrings to easily create hyperlinks to other components:
Django Component | reStructuredText roles |
---|---|
Models | :model:`app_label.ModelName` |
Views | :view:`app_label.view_name` |
Template tags | :tag:`tagname` |
Template filters | :filter:`filtername` |
Templates | :template:`path/to/template.html` |
Model reference¶
The models section of the admindocs
page describes each model in the
system along with all the fields and methods (without any arguments) available
on it. While model properties don’t have any arguments, they are not listed.
Relationships to other models appear as hyperlinks. Descriptions are pulled
from help_text
attributes on fields or from docstrings on model methods.
A model with useful documentation might look like this:
class BlogEntry(models.Model):
"""
Stores a single blog entry, related to :model:`blog.Blog` and
:model:`auth.User`.
"""
slug = models.SlugField(help_text="A short label, generally used in URLs.")
author = models.ForeignKey(User)
blog = models.ForeignKey(Blog)
...
def publish(self):
"""Makes the blog entry live on the site."""
...
View reference¶
Each URL in your site has a separate entry in the admindocs
page, and
clicking on a given URL will show you the corresponding view. Helpful things
you can document in your view function docstrings include:
- A short description of what the view does.
- The context, or a list of variables available in the view’s template.
- The name of the template or templates that are used for that view.
For example:
from django.shortcuts import render
from myapp.models import MyModel
def my_view(request, slug):
"""
Display an individual :model:`myapp.MyModel`.
**Context**
``mymodel``
An instance of :model:`myapp.MyModel`.
**Template:**
:template:`myapp/my_template.html`
"""
context = {'mymodel': MyModel.objects.get(slug=slug)}
return render(request, 'myapp/my_template.html', context)
Template tags and filters reference¶
The tags and filters admindocs
sections describe all the tags and
filters that come with Django (in fact, the built-in tag reference and built-in filter reference documentation come directly from those
pages). Any tags or filters that you create or are added by a third-party app
will show up in these sections as well.
Template reference¶
While admindocs
does not include a place to document templates by
themselves, if you use the :template:`path/to/template.html`
syntax in a
docstring the resulting page will verify the path of that template with
Django’s template loaders. This can be a handy way to
check if the specified template exists and to show where on the filesystem that
template is stored.
Included Bookmarklets¶
Several useful bookmarklets are available from the admindocs
page:
- Documentation for this page
- Jumps you from any page to the documentation for the view that generates that page.
- Show object ID
- Shows the content-type and unique ID for pages that represent a single object.
- Edit this object
- Jumps to the admin page for pages that represent a single object.
Using these bookmarklets requires that you are either logged into the
Django admin
as a
User
with
is_staff
set to True
, or that the
XViewMiddleware
is installed and you are accessing the site from an IP
address listed in INTERNAL_IPS
.