Django Debug Toolbar

The Django Debug Toolbar is a configurable set of panels that display various debug information about the current request/response and when clicked, display more details about the panel's content.

Currently, the following panels have been written and are working:

• Django version
• Request timer
• A list of settings in settings.py
• Common HTTP headers
• GET/POST/cookie/session variable display
• Templates and context used, and their template paths
• SQL queries including time to execute and links to EXPLAIN each query
• Cache stats
• Logging output via Python's built-in logging module

If you have ideas for other panels please let us know.

Installation

1. Add the debug_toolbar directory to your Python path.

2. Add the following middleware to your project's settings.py file:

   'debug_toolbar.middleware.DebugToolbarMiddleware',

   Tying into middleware allows each panel to be instantiated on request and rendering to happen on response.

   The order of MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES is important: the Debug Toolbar middleware must come after any other middleware that encodes the response's content (such as GZipMiddleware).

3. Make sure your IP is listed in the INTERNAL_IPS setting. If you are working locally this will be:

   INTERNAL_IPS = ('127.0.0.1',)

4. Add debug_toolbar to your INSTALLED_APPS setting so Django can find the the template files associated with the Debug Toolbar.

   Alternatively, add the path to the debug toolbar templates ('path/to/debug_toolbar/templates' to your TEMPLATE_DIRS setting.)

5. Optional: Add a tuple called DEBUG_TOOLBAR_PANELS to your settings.py file that specifies the full Python path to the panel that you want included in the Toolbar. This setting looks very much like the MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES setting. For example:

   DEBUG_TOOLBAR_PANELS = (
       'debug_toolbar.panels.version.VersionDebugPanel',
       'debug_toolbar.panels.timer.TimerDebugPanel',
       'debug_toolbar.panels.settings_vars.SettingsVarsDebugPanel',
       'debug_toolbar.panels.headers.HeaderDebugPanel',
       'debug_toolbar.panels.request_vars.RequestVarsDebugPanel',
       'debug_toolbar.panels.template.TemplateDebugPanel',
       'debug_toolbar.panels.sql.SQLDebugPanel',
       'debug_toolbar.panels.cache.CacheDebugPanel',
       'debug_toolbar.panels.logger.LoggingPanel',
   )
   

   You can change the ordering of this tuple to customize the order of the panels you want to display. And you can include panels that you have created or that are specific to your project.

TODO

• Panel idea: AJAX call to show cprofile data similar to the ?prof idea
• CSS Stylings
• Restructure panels to popular context that pushes up to the toolbar
• Make the trigger whether to display the toolbar configurable with options such as if: DEBUG is true, IP is in INTERNAL_IPS, authenticated user is_superuser, etc.