Django 1.5.2 release notes

August 13, 2013

This is Django 1.5.2, a bugfix and security release for Django 1.5.

Mitigated possible XSS attack via user-supplied redirect URLs

Django relies on user input in some cases (e.g. django.contrib.auth.views.login(), django.contrib.comments, and i18n) to redirect the user to an “on success” URL. The security checks for these redirects (namely django.utils.http.is_safe_url()) didn’t check if the scheme is http(s) and as such allowed javascript:... URLs to be entered. If a developer relied on is_safe_url() to provide safe redirect targets and put such a URL into a link, they could suffer from a XSS attack. This bug doesn’t affect Django currently, since we only put this URL into the Location response header and browsers seem to ignore JavaScript there.

XSS vulnerability in django.contrib.admin

If a URLField is used in Django 1.5, it displays the current value of the field and a link to the target on the admin change page. The display routine of this widget was flawed and allowed for XSS.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a crash with prefetch_related() (#19607) as well as some pickle regressions with prefetch_related (#20157 and #20257).
• Fixed a regression in django.contrib.gis in the Google Map output on Python 3 (#20773).
• Made DjangoTestSuiteRunner.setup_databases properly handle aliases for the default database (#19940) and prevented teardown_databases from attempting to tear down aliases (#20681).
• Fixed the django.core.cache.backends.memcached.MemcachedCache backend’s get_many() method on Python 3 (#20722).
• Fixed django.contrib.humanize translation syntax errors. Affected languages: Mexican Spanish, Mongolian, Romanian, Turkish (#20695).
• Added support for wheel packages (#19252).
• The CSRF token now rotates when a user logs in.
• Some Python 3 compatibility fixes including #20212 and #20025.
• Fixed some rare cases where get() exceptions recursed infinitely (#20278).
• makemessages no longer crashes with UnicodeDecodeError (#20354).
• Fixed geojson detection with SpatiaLite.
• assertContains() once again works with binary content (#20237).
• Fixed ManyToManyField if it has a unicode name parameter (#20207).
• Ensured that the WSGI request’s path is correctly based on the SCRIPT_NAME environment variable or the FORCE_SCRIPT_NAME setting, regardless of whether or not either has a trailing slash (#20169).
• Fixed an obscure bug with the override_settings() decorator. If you hit an AttributeError: 'Settings' object has no attribute '_original_allowed_hosts' exception, it’s probably fixed (#20636).