Django 5.2 release notes - UNDER DEVELOPMENT

Expected April 2025

Welcome to Django 5.2!

These release notes cover the new features, as well as some backwards incompatible changes you should be aware of when upgrading from Django 5.1 or earlier. We’ve begun the deprecation process for some features.

See the How to upgrade Django to a newer version guide if you’re updating an existing project.

Django 5.2 is designated as a long-term support release. It will receive security updates for at least three years after its release. Support for the previous LTS, Django 4.2, will end in April 2026.

Python compatibility

Django 5.2 supports Python 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, and 3.13. We highly recommend and only officially support the latest release of each series.

What’s new in Django 5.2

Composite Primary Keys

The new django.db.models.CompositePrimaryKey allows tables to be created with a primary key consisting of multiple fields.

To use a composite primary key, when creating a model set the pk field to be a CompositePrimaryKey:

from django.db import models


class Release(models.Model):
    pk = models.CompositePrimaryKey("version", "name")
    version = models.IntegerField()
    name = models.CharField(max_length=20)

See Composite primary keys for more details.

Minor features

django.contrib.admin

• The admin/base.html template now has a new block extrabody for adding custom code before the closing </body> tag.

django.contrib.admindocs

• Links to components in docstrings now supports custom link text, using the format :role:`link text <link>`. See documentation helpers for more details.

• The model pages are now restricted to users with the corresponding view or change permissions.

django.contrib.auth

• The default iteration count for the PBKDF2 password hasher is increased from 870,000 to 1,000,000.

• The following new asynchronous methods are now provided, using an a prefix:

  • UserManager.acreate_user()

  • UserManager.acreate_superuser()

  • BaseUserManager.aget_by_natural_key()

  • User.aget_user_permissions()

  • User.aget_all_permissions()

  • User.aget_group_permissions()

  • User.ahas_perm()

  • User.ahas_perms()

  • User.ahas_module_perms()

  • User.aget_user_permissions()

  • User.aget_group_permissions()

  • User.ahas_perm()

  • ModelBackend.aauthenticate()

  • ModelBackend.aget_user_permissions()

  • ModelBackend.aget_group_permissions()

  • ModelBackend.aget_all_permissions()

  • ModelBackend.ahas_perm()

  • ModelBackend.ahas_module_perms()

  • RemoteUserBackend.aauthenticate()

  • RemoteUserBackend.aconfigure_user()

• Auth backends can now provide async implementations which are used when calling async auth functions (e.g. aauthenticate()) to reduce context-switching which improves performance. See adding an async interface for more details.

• The password validator classes now have a new method get_error_message(), which can be overridden in subclasses to customize the error messages.

django.contrib.contenttypes

• …

django.contrib.gis

• GDAL now supports curved geometries CurvePolygon, CompoundCurve, CircularString, MultiSurface, and MultiCurve via the new OGRGeometry.has_curve property, and the OGRGeometry.get_linear_geometry() and OGRGeometry.get_curve_geometry() methods.

• coveredby and covers lookup are now supported on MySQL.

• coveredby and isvalid lookups, Collect aggregation, and GeoHash and IsValid database functions are now supported on MariaDB 11.7+.

django.contrib.messages

• …

django.contrib.postgres

• …

django.contrib.redirects

• …

django.contrib.sessions

• …

django.contrib.sitemaps

• …

django.contrib.sites

• …

django.contrib.staticfiles

• …

django.contrib.syndication

• All SyndicationFeed classes now support a stylesheets attribute. If specified, an <? xml-stylesheet ?> processing instruction will be added to the top of the document for each stylesheet in the given list. See Feed stylesheets for more details.

Asynchronous views

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Cache

• …

CSRF

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Database backends

• MySQL connections now default to using the utf8mb4 character set, instead of utf8, which is an alias for the deprecated character set utf8mb3.

Decorators

• method_decorator() now supports wrapping asynchronous view methods.

Email

• Tuple items of EmailMessage.attachments and EmailMultiAlternatives.attachments are now named tuples, as opposed to regular tuples.

• EmailMultiAlternatives.alternatives is now a list of named tuples, as opposed to regular tuples.

• The new body_contains() method returns a boolean indicating whether a provided text is contained in the email body and in all attached MIME type text/* alternatives.

Error Reporting

• The attribute SafeExceptionReporterFilter.hidden_settings now treats values as sensitive if their name includes AUTH.

File Storage

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File Uploads

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Forms

• The new ColorInput form widget is for entering a color in rrggbb hexadecimal format and renders as <input type="color" ...>. Some browsers support a visual color picker interface for this input type.

• The new SearchInput form widget is for entering search queries and renders as <input type="search" ...>.

• The new TelInput form widget is for entering telephone numbers and renders as <input type="tel" ...>.

• The new field_id argument for ErrorList allows an HTML id attribute to be added in the error template. See ErrorList.field_id for details.

Generic Views

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Internationalization

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Logging

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Management Commands

• A new warning is displayed when running runserver, indicating that it is unsuitable for production. This warning can be suppressed by setting the HIDE_PRODUCTION_WARNING environment variable to "true".

• The makemigrations and migrate commands have a new Command.autodetector attribute for subclasses to override in order to use a custom autodetector class.

Migrations

• The new operation AlterConstraint is a no-op operation that alters constraints without dropping and recreating constraints in the database.

Models

• The SELECT clause generated when using QuerySet.values() and QuerySet.values_list() now matches the specified order of the referenced expressions. Previously, the order was based of a set of counterintuitive rules which made query combination through methods such as QuerySet.union() unpredictable.

• Added support for validation of model constraints which use a GeneratedField.

• The new Expression.set_returning attribute specifies that the expression contains a set-returning function, enforcing subquery evaluation. This is necessary for many Postgres set-returning functions.

• CharField.max_length is no longer required to be set on SQLite, which supports unlimited VARCHAR columns.

• QuerySet.explain() now supports the memory and serialize options on PostgreSQL 17+.

Requests and Responses

• The new HttpResponse.text property provides the string representation of HttpResponse.content.

• The new HttpRequest.get_preferred_type() method can be used to query the preferred media type the client accepts.

• The new preserve_request argument for HttpResponseRedirect and HttpResponsePermanentRedirect determines whether the HTTP status codes 302/307 or 301/308 are used, respectively.

• The new preserve_request argument for redirect() allows to instruct the user agent to reuse the HTTP method and body during redirection using specific status codes.

Security

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Serialization

• Each serialization format now defines a Deserializer class, rather than a function, to improve extensibility when defining a custom serialization format.

Signals

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Templates

• The new simple_block_tag() decorator enables the creation of simple block tags, which can accept and use a section of the template.

Tests

• Stack frames from Django’s custom assertions are now hidden. This makes test failures easier to read and enables test --pdb to directly enter into the failing test method.

• Data loaded from fixtures and from migrations enabled with serialized_rollback=True are now available during TransactionTestCase.setUpClass().

URLs

• …

Utilities

• SafeString now returns NotImplemented in __add__ for non-string right-hand side values. This aligns with the str addition behavior and allows __radd__ to be used if available.

• format_html_join() now supports taking an iterable of mappings, passing their contents as keyword arguments to format_html().

Validators

• …

Backwards incompatible changes in 5.2

Database backend API

This section describes changes that may be needed in third-party database backends.

• The new Model._is_pk_set() method allows checking if a Model instance’s primary key is defined.

• BaseDatabaseOperations.adapt_decimalfield_value() is now a no-op, simply returning the given value.

django.contrib.gis

• Support for PostGIS 3.0 is removed.

• Support for GDAL 3.0 is removed.

Dropped support for PostgreSQL 13

Upstream support for PostgreSQL 13 ends in November 2025. Django 5.2 supports PostgreSQL 14 and higher.

Changed MySQL connection character set default

MySQL connections now default to using the utf8mb4 character set, instead of utf8, which is an alias for the deprecated character set utf8mb3. utf8mb3 can be specified in the OPTIONS part of the DATABASES setting, if needed for legacy databases.

Miscellaneous

• Adding EmailMultiAlternatives.alternatives is now only supported via the attach_alternative() method.

• The minimum supported version of gettext is increased from 0.15 to 0.19.

• HttpRequest.accepted_types is now sorted by the client’s preference, based on the request’s Accept header.

• The attributes UniqueConstraint.violation_error_code and UniqueConstraint.violation_error_message are now always used when provided. Previously, they were ignored if UniqueConstraint.fields was set without a UniqueConstraint.condition.

• The debug() context processor is no longer included in the default project template.

• The following methods now have alters_data=True set to prevent side effects when rendering a template context:

  • UserManager.create_user()

  • UserManager.acreate_user()

  • UserManager.create_superuser()

  • UserManager.acreate_superuser()

  • QuerySet.create()

  • QuerySet.acreate()

  • QuerySet.bulk_create()

  • QuerySet.abulk_create()

  • QuerySet.get_or_create()

  • QuerySet.aget_or_create()

  • QuerySet.update_or_create()

  • QuerySet.aupdate_or_create()

Features deprecated in 5.2

Miscellaneous

• The all argument for the django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.find() function is deprecated in favor of the find_all argument.

• The fallback to request.user when user is None in django.contrib.auth.login() and django.contrib.auth.alogin() will be removed.