Installation¶

Assuming you have django installed, the first step is to install django-tenants.

pip install django-tenants

Basic Settings¶

You’ll have to make the following modifications to your settings.py file.

Your DATABASE_ENGINE setting needs to be changed to

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django_tenants.postgresql_backend',
        # ..
    }
}

Add django_tenants.routers.TenantSyncRouter to your DATABASE_ROUTERS setting, so that the correct apps can be synced, depending on what’s being synced (shared or tenant).

DATABASE_ROUTERS = (
    'django_tenants.routers.TenantSyncRouter',
)

Add the middleware django_tenants.middleware.main.TenantMainMiddleware to the top of MIDDLEWARE, so that each request can be set to use the correct schema.

MIDDLEWARE = (
    'django_tenants.middleware.main.TenantMainMiddleware',
    #...
)

Make sure you have django.template.context_processors.request listed under the context_processors option of TEMPLATES otherwise the tenant will not be available on request.

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        #...
        'OPTIONS': {
            'context_processors': [
                'django.template.context_processors.request',
                #...
            ],
        },
    },
]

The Tenant & Domain Model¶

Now we have to create your tenant model. Your tenant model can contain whichever fields you want, however, you must inherit from TenantMixin. This Mixin only has one field schema_name which is required. You also have to have a table for your domain names for this you must inherit from DomainMixin .

Here’s an example, suppose we have an app named customers and we want to create a model called Client.

from django.db import models
from django_tenants.models import TenantMixin, DomainMixin

class Client(TenantMixin):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    paid_until =  models.DateField()
    on_trial = models.BooleanField()
    created_on = models.DateField(auto_now_add=True)

    # default true, schema will be automatically created and synced when it is saved
    auto_create_schema = True

class Domain(DomainMixin):
    pass

Admin Support¶

TenantAdminMixin is available in order to register the tenant model. Here’s an example (following the example above), we want to register the Client model, so we create a the related admin class ClientAdmin. The mixin disables save and delete buttons when not in current or public tenant (preventing Exceptions).

from django.contrib import admin
from django_tenants.admin import TenantAdminMixin

from myapp.models import Client

@admin.register(Client)
class ClientAdmin(TenantAdminMixin, admin.ModelAdmin):
        list_display = ('name', 'paid_until')

Configure Tenant and Shared Applications¶

To make use of shared and tenant-specific applications, there are two settings called SHARED_APPS and TENANT_APPS. SHARED_APPS is a tuple of strings just like INSTALLED_APPS and should contain all apps that you want to be synced to public. If SHARED_APPS is set, then these are the only apps that will be synced to your public schema! The same applies for TENANT_APPS, it expects a tuple of strings where each string is an app. If set, only those applications will be synced to all your tenants. Here’s a sample setting

SHARED_APPS = (
    'django_tenants',  # mandatory
    'customers', # you must list the app where your tenant model resides in

    'django.contrib.contenttypes',

    # everything below here is optional
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.admin',
)

TENANT_APPS = (
    # your tenant-specific apps
    'myapp.hotels',
    'myapp.houses',
)

INSTALLED_APPS = list(SHARED_APPS) + [app for app in TENANT_APPS if app not in SHARED_APPS]

You also have to set where your tenant & domain models are located.

TENANT_MODEL = "customers.Client" # app.Model

TENANT_DOMAIN_MODEL = "customers.Domain"  # app.Model

Now run migrate_schemas --shared, this will create the shared apps on the public schema. Note: your database should be empty if this is the first time you’re running this command.

python manage.py migrate_schemas --shared

Note

If you use migrate migrations will be applied to both shared and tenant schemas!

Warning

You might need to run makemigrations and then migrate_schemas --shared again for your app.Models to be created in the database.

Lastly, you need to create a tenant whose schema is public and it’s address is your domain URL. Please see the section on use.

You can also specify extra schemas that should be visible to all queries using PG_EXTRA_SEARCH_PATHS setting.

PG_EXTRA_SEARCH_PATHS = ['extensions']

PG_EXTRA_SEARCH_PATHS should be a list of schemas you want to make visible globally.

Tip

You can create a dedicated schema to hold postgresql extensions and make it available globally. This helps avoid issues caused by hiding the public schema from queries.

Warning

By default, a check is performed to validate that the additional extension schemas do not conflict with the tenant schemas. If you want to ignore this check, you can set SKIP_PG_EXTRA_VALIDATION to True. We do not recommend disabling this validation, it is at your own risk.

Sub-folder Support¶

Currently in beta.

There is a option that allows you to run Django-Tenants with sub-folder instead of sub-domains.

Note

e.g. http://www.mydomain.local/r/schemaname/ instead of http://schemaname.mydomain.local/

Warning

The schemaname value from the URL path has to match domain value which is set when creating a new tenant, as described https://django-tenants.readthedocs.io/en/latest/use.html#creating-a-tenant

TENANT_SUBFOLDER_PREFIX needs to be added to the settings file. This is the url prefix for the tenant this can’t be left blank.

TENANT_SUBFOLDER_PREFIX = "clients"

In the example given above, the prefixed path ``/r`` will become ``/clients``.
e.g.  http://www.mydomain.local/clients/schemaname/ instead of http://www.mydomain.local/r/schemaname/

The middleware is different to the standard middleware. The middleware required is

MIDDLEWARE = (
    'django_tenants.middleware.TenantSubfolderMiddleware',
    #...
)

Tip

There is an example project for this in the examples folder

Optional Settings¶

PUBLIC_SCHEMA_NAME¶

Default: 'public'

The schema name that will be treated as public, that is, where the SHARED_APPS will be created.

TENANT_CREATION_FAKES_MIGRATIONS¶

Default: 'False'

Sets if the schemas will be copied from an existing “template” schema instead of running migrations. Useful in the cases where migrations can not be faked and need to be ran individually, or when running migrations takes a long time. Be aware that setting this to True may significantly slow down the process of creating tenants.

When using this option, you must also specify which schema to use as template, under TENANT_BASE_SCHEMA.

TENANT_BASE_SCHEMA¶

Default: None

The name of the schema to use as a template for creating new tenants. Only used when TENANT_CREATION_FAKES_MIGRATIONS is enabled.

TENANT_SYNC_ROUTER¶

Default: django_tenants.routers.TenantSyncRouter

The name of the database router that ready() checks for when the django_tenant app checks for. If set then place this in DATABASE_ROUTERS.

DATABASE_ROUTERS = [
    # ..
    TENANT_SYNC_ROUTER
    # ..
]

TENANT_MIGRATION_ORDER¶

Default: None

A list of fields to order the tenant queryset by when migrating schemas.

Tenant View-Routing¶

PUBLIC_SCHEMA_URLCONF¶

Default: None

We have a goodie called PUBLIC_SCHEMA_URLCONF. Suppose you have your main website at example.com and a customer at customer.example.com. You probably want your user to be routed to different views when someone requests http://example.com/ and http://customer.example.com/. Because django only uses the string after the host name, this would be impossible, both would call the view at /. This is where PUBLIC_SCHEMA_URLCONF comes in handy. If set, when the public schema is being requested, the value of this variable will be used instead of ROOT_URLCONF. So for example, if you have

PUBLIC_SCHEMA_URLCONF = 'myproject.urls_public'

When requesting the view /login/ from the public tenant (your main website), it will search for this path on PUBLIC_SCHEMA_URLCONF instead of ROOT_URLCONF.

Separate projects for the main website and tenants (optional)¶

In some cases using the PUBLIC_SCHEMA_URLCONF can be difficult. For example, Django CMS takes some control over the default Django URL routing by using middlewares that do not play well with the tenants. Another example would be when some apps on the main website need different settings than the tenants website. In these cases it is much simpler if you just run the main website example.com as a separate application.

If your projects are ran using a WSGI configuration, this can be done by creating a file called wsgi_main_website.py in the same folder as wsgi.py.

# wsgi_main_website.py
import os
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "project.settings_public")

from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
application = get_wsgi_application()

If you put this in the same Django project, you can make a new settings_public.py which points to a different urls_public.py. This has the advantage that you can use the same apps that you use for your tenant websites.

Or you can create a completely separate project for the main website.

Caching¶

To enable tenant aware caching you can set the KEY_FUNCTION setting to use the provided make_key helper function which adds the tenants schema_name as the first key prefix.

CACHES = {
    "default": {
        ...
        'KEY_FUNCTION': 'django_tenants.cache.make_key',
        'REVERSE_KEY_FUNCTION': 'django_tenants.cache.reverse_key',
    },
}

The REVERSE_KEY_FUNCTION setting is only required if you are using the django-redis cache backend.

Configuring your Apache Server (optional)¶

Here’s how you can configure your Apache server to route all subdomains to your django project so you don’t have to setup any subdomains manually.

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:8080>
    ServerName mywebsite.com
    ServerAlias *.mywebsite.com mywebsite.com
    WSGIScriptAlias / "/path/to/django/scripts/mywebsite.wsgi"
</VirtualHost>

Django’s Deployment with Apache and mod_wsgi might interest you too.

Building Documentation¶

Documentation is available in docs and can be built into a number of formats using Sphinx. To get started

pip install Sphinx
cd docs
make html

This creates the documentation in HTML format at docs/_build/html.