django-model-audit-history

Provides an AuditHistory model field to store a chronological record of changes to a model (“audit history”) on the model. The historical record is stored in a designated JSON field, so no additional database tables are required.

Supports Django 1.11 (and possibly Django 2.x in the future) and PostgreSQL database backends.

CI

Usage

The basic principles are as follows:

1. To enable this for a model, you have to make these changes:

   • add an AuditHistoryField named history to the model
   • add the AuditHistoryMixin to the model class
   • create ModelAdmin:

   ModelAdmin(AuditHistoryAdminMixin, admin.ModelAdmin): 
       pass
   

   • add your ModelAdmin to admin site admin.site.register(model, ModelAdmin)

2. Then, instead of calling regular save() on the model after changing it, call save_with_audit_record() instead (passing in some meta data you want saved alongside, e.g. the event that caused the change, the user triggering it and some payload usually the set of modified fields.

3. The history will appear in human-readable form in the admin.

That’s pretty much all there is to it.

Testapp setup and first steps

1. Install Postgres locally (e.g. 10.x)
2. Create local database audithistory, owned by user dev
3. Create a virtualenv and activate: virtualenv venv, then source venv/bin/activate
4. Install dependencies into virtualenv: pip install --requirement requirements.txt
5. Run manage.py migrate
6. Run manage.py createsuperuser
7. Run manage.py runserver
8. Create new model on http://localhost:8000/admin/test_app/blogpost/
9. Edit model via http://localhost:8000/edit/1/
10. Reload admin page and inspect history record

Run tests in local environment:

• Run manage.py test (Ensure that user dev has rights to db creation alter user dev createdb;)