Configuration

dj_tracker settings

All dj_tracker settings must be defined in a dictionary named DJ_TRACKER in your project's settings.

APPS_TO_EXCLUDE

By default, dj_tracker tracks all models in all apps except from dj_tracker itself. You can add additionnal apps to exclude with this setting:

DJ_TRACKER = {
    "APPS_TO_EXCLUDE": {"third-party-app", "test-app"},
}

IGNORE_PATHS

Requests to URLs containing any component defined in this setting aren't tracked.

DJ_TRACKER = {
    "IGNORE_PATHS": {"/favicon.ico", "/static/"}
}

IGNORE_MODULES

A set of file or module names to ignore in tracebacks.

DJ_TRACKER = {
    "IGNORE_MODULES": {"whitenoise/", "sentry_sdk/"}
}

COLLECTION_INTERVAL

Interval at which the Collector should save trackings. The default value is 5s.

DJ_TRACKER = {
    "COLLECTION_INTERVAL": 1
}

FIELD_DESCRIPTORS

If your program uses custom field descriptors, you can specify the path to the descriptor to use when tracking fields of that type. It can simply be the built-in EditableFieldDescriptor but can also be any subclass of FieldDescriptor provided that it's a data descriptor (i.e implements the __set__ method).

For example, Wagtail defines a Creator descriptor for its StreamField that can be tracked as follows:

DJ_TRACKER = {
    "FIELD_DESCRIPTORS": {
        "Creator": "dj_tracker.field_descriptors.EditableFieldDescriptor"
    }
}

TRACK_ATTRIBUTES_ACCESSED

dj-tracker patches the __getattribute__ method on tracked models to provide hints on using values or values_list when it detects that no model attribute or method was accessed except the fields fetched from the database. This add an overhead to every attribute access. To disable this feature, set this setting to False. It's enabled by default.

DJ_TRACKER = {
    "TRACK_ATTRIBUTES_ACCESSED": False
}

trackings database

dj_tracker gives the possibility to have a separate table to store trackings. This can be useful if you intend to run it with your tests, to track model instances in different databases (staging, production, ...) but also to monitor your queries between releases.

Add the database

Add a trackings entry to your DATABASES settings:

DATABASES = {
    "default": ...,
    "trackings": {
        "ENGINE": "django.db.backends.sqlite3",
        "NAME": str(BASE_DIR / "trackings"),
    },
}

The examples uses a sqlite database but you can use any engine.

Add the database router

Add the following to the list of DATABASE_ROUTERS:

DATABASE_ROUTERS = [
    ...,
    "dj_tracker.db_router.DjTrackerRouter",
]

Run migrations

Run the migrations for the trackings database:

python manage.py migrate dj_tracker --database=trackings