Django documentation

This is a specific Arecibo installation for Django.

Source

It can be checked out of SVN at:

svn co http://arecibo.svn.beanstalkapp.com/clients/trunk/django/ arecibo

This can be placed into your Django application, or anywhere on the path that Django can find it.

Configuration

Add the following to settings.py:

ARECIBO_PUBLIC_ACCOUNT_NUMBER = "yourpublicaccountnumber"

Optionally specify the transport, it will default to http. Using http:

ARECIBO_TRANSPORT = "http"

Django uses the built in send_email function to send out emails to Arecibo, if you'd like to do that set:

ARECIBO_TRANSPORT = "smtp"

There are two ways to send errors to Arecibo. You can either add in some middleware or add to your custom error handlers. If you do both you'll likely end up posting everything twice.

Adding to your middleware

Django has a middleware layer to handle errors from views. This means that url routing errors (for example) that do not reach a view, do not get processed. Add in the following line to the middleware in Django:

arecibo.middleware.AreciboMiddleware

So that it would look something like this:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
  'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
  'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
  'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware', 
  'arecibo.middleware.AreciboMiddleware',
)

Adding to your custom views

Django has a 404 or 500 error handler that can be overridden. We can use this to post to Arecibo, for example here's a standard 500 error handler:

from django.template import RequestContext, loader
from django.http import HttpResponse

def application_error(request):                     
    t = loader.get_template('500.html')
    c = RequestContext(request)
    return HttpResponse(t.render(c), status=500)

Add into this your post to Arecibo so it reads:

from django.template import RequestContext, loader
from django.http import HttpResponse
from arecibo.wrapper import post

def application_error(request):                     
    t = loader.get_template('500.html')
    uid = post(request, 500)
    c = RequestContext(request, {"uid": uid})
    return HttpResponse(t.render(c), status=500)

In your 500.html template, you'll now have access to the UID that was posted to Arecibo if you'd like to display that to users.

Other times

You can send an error to Arecibo at pretty much any time, for example if you need to capture an error in a view. You can just call the post method and pass through the request.

Notes

By default we set all 404 as priority 5, 500 as priority 1 and the rest as priority 3. This can be altered in the wrapper.py module.

The Django documentation does suggest that a 500 may not be rendered and this is true, some errors will be catastrophically bad and prevent a page being returned, but if we can, we can give some response.

The following errors will be set automatically: url, ip, traceback, type, msg, status, uid and user_agent.