Summary

The article provides a step-by-step guide on moving the Django admin site to a subdomain using django-hosts in Django 4.0.

Abstract

The author shares their experience with learning Django and the challenges faced when trying to move the admin site to a subdomain. Despite finding some helpful tutorials, they found the need to create a more tailored guide for Django 4.0. The article outlines six steps, starting from setting up the project skeleton to configuring django-hosts for handling subdomains, adjusting URL patterns, and updating the ALLOWED_HOSTS for local testing. The author emphasizes the importance of creating a separate admin URLs file and registering the domains in mysite/hosts.py. The guide concludes with the hope that it will save time for others encountering similar challenges and an invitation to stay connected with the author's future work in various technology spaces.

Opinions

The author acknowledges the utility of Django and its straightforwardness for most tasks but highlights the complexity of moving the admin site to a subdomain.
Some existing tutorials were not entirely aligned with the author's goals, indicating a need for an updated guide specific to Django 4.0.
The author suggests that the Django framework has undergone significant changes over the years, which may render some solutions obsolete.
They express a desire to focus on data science and machine learning in their technical blog but also show an openness to exploring other technologies.
The author encourages readers to join their email list or become a Medium member, indicating a commitment to sharing knowledge and building a community.

How To Move The Admin Site to a Subdomain in Django 4.0*

With the the help of django-hosts and a thousand tutorials

Ok, ok, Django is pretty neat! I’ve been putting off learning it for a while, but finally broke down. Most things are pretty straightforward so far, but this particularly problem gave me some trouble so here goes.

To be fair, some of these tutorials were helpful to get me started, but not quite what I wanted:

Step 0: Setup Project Skeleton

I’m assuming that you’ve run something similar to these commands to get your app started (I’m just going with the Django tutorial here):

django-admin startproject mysite
cd mysite
python manage.py startapp polls
python mangae.py migrate

The created structure will look something like this:

Step 1: Download django-hosts & Apply Standard Configs

Download django-hosts with pip:

pip install django-hosts

I would add django-hosts to your requirements.txt as well. Then the next few steps are pretty standard.

Add django_hosts to INSTALLED_APPS in mysite/settings.py.
Add ‘django_hosts.middleware.HostsRequestMiddleware’ to the beginning of MIDDLEWARE in mysite/settings.py.
Add ‘django_hosts.middleware.HostsResponseMiddleware’ to the end of MIDDLEWARE in mysite/settings.py.

Step 2: Add app-specific but non-admin URLS to polls/urls.py and mysite/urls.py

My polls/urls.py looks something like this. Say your domain is something like website.com. view.index is what your user would see when they visit website.com, and views.some_url is what they see when they go to website.com/some-url.

from django.urls import path
from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    path('', views.index),
    path("some-url/", views.some_url)
]

My mysite/urls.py looks something like below. “polls.urls” points to polls/urls.py.

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include

urlpatterns = [path('', include("polls.urls"))]

Step 3: Create a separate admin urls file under polls/

I named mine urls_admin.py and it looks something like this:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path

urlpatterns = [path('', admin.site.urls),]

I don’t think this file needs to be under polls. You can probably put it under mysite/ right next to settings.py if that makes more sense so long as you can point to it.

Step 4: Create mysite/hosts.py and register the domains

This file should be in the same directory as settings.py.

from django_hosts import patterns, host
host_patterns = pattern(
    '',
    host(r'', mysite.urls, name=' '),
    host(r'admin', 'polls.url_admins', name='admin')

The name parameters are important, as you’ll refer to those in settings.py. The first parameter to host is the subdomain of choice. If I were to specify host(r'abc', 'polls.url_admins', name='admin') , then I would see the admin page if I go to abc.website.com.

Since we’re done adding files, here’s what the final tree structure should look like:

Step 5: Specify ROOT_HOSTCONF & DEFAULT_HOST

With the above input, my ROOT_HOSTCONF and DEFAULT_HOST are:

ROOT_HOSTCONF = 'mysite.hosts' # points to mysite/hosts.py
DEFAULT_HOST = ' ' # name in host(r'', mysite.urls, name=' ')

Step 6 (Optional): Add the (Sub)Domains to ALLOWED_HOSTS for Local Testing

My ALLOWED_HOSTS looks like this:

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ["localhost", "admin.localhost"]

So, if you go to localhost:8000 , you’ll see the main page of your polls app, and admind.localhost:8000 will point to the admin page!

Wrap-Up

The amount of time it took me to put this together is kind of embarrassing, so I hope this helps the next person save time. When I was looking up solutions, it looks like Django has changed quite a bit through the years, so your guess is as good as mine on how long this solution stays relevant.

Stay Connected

I’d like to stay within the data science & ML space for my technical blog, but who am I kidding. There are way too many fun technologies about there to play with the limit myself. If you’re interested, join my email list, or become a Medium member (I’ll be receiving ~50% of your membership fees if you use this link) if you aren’t already. See you next post!