Django’s admindocs
app pulls documentation from the docstrings of models, views, template tags, and template filters for any app in INSTALLED_APPS
and makes that documentation available from the Django admin
.
Overview
To activate the admindocs
, you will need to do the following:
- Add
django.contrib.admindocs
to yourINSTALLED_APPS
. - Add
url(r'^admin/doc/', include('django.contrib.admindocs.urls'))
to yoururlpatterns
. Make sure it’s included before ther'^admin/'
entry, so that requests to/admin/doc/
don’t get handled by the latter entry. - Install the docutils Python module (http://docutils.sf.net/).
-
Optional: Using the admindocs bookmarklets requires
django.contrib.admindocs.middleware.XViewMiddleware
to be installed.
Once those steps are complete, you can start browsing the documentation by going to your admin interface and clicking the “Documentation” link in the upper right of the page.
Documentation helpers
The following special markup can be used in your docstrings to easily create hyperlinks to other components:
Django Component | reStructuredText roles |
---|---|
Models | :model:`app_label.ModelName` |
Views | :view:`app_label.view_name` |
Template tags | :tag:`tagname` |
Template filters | :filter:`filtername` |
Templates | :template:`path/to/template.html` |
Model reference
The models section of the admindocs
page describes each model in the system along with all the fields and methods available on it. Relationships to other models appear as hyperlinks. Descriptions are pulled from help_text
attributes on fields or from docstrings on model methods.
The models section of the admindocs
now describes methods that take arguments as well. In previous versions it was restricted to methods without arguments.
A model with useful documentation might look like this:
class BlogEntry(models.Model): """ Stores a single blog entry, related to :model:`blog.Blog` and :model:`auth.User`. """ slug = models.SlugField(help_text="A short label, generally used in URLs.") author = models.ForeignKey( User, models.SET_NULL, blank=True, null=True, ) blog = models.ForeignKey(Blog, models.CASCADE) ... def publish(self): """Makes the blog entry live on the site.""" ...
View reference
Each URL in your site has a separate entry in the admindocs
page, and clicking on a given URL will show you the corresponding view. Helpful things you can document in your view function docstrings include:
- A short description of what the view does.
- The context, or a list of variables available in the view’s template.
- The name of the template or templates that are used for that view.
For example:
from django.shortcuts import render from myapp.models import MyModel def my_view(request, slug): """ Display an individual :model:`myapp.MyModel`. **Context** ``mymodel`` An instance of :model:`myapp.MyModel`. **Template:** :template:`myapp/my_template.html` """ context = {'mymodel': MyModel.objects.get(slug=slug)} return render(request, 'myapp/my_template.html', context)
Template tags and filters reference
The tags and filters admindocs
sections describe all the tags and filters that come with Django (in fact, the built-in tag reference and built-in filter reference documentation come directly from those pages). Any tags or filters that you create or are added by a third-party app will show up in these sections as well.
Template reference
While admindocs
does not include a place to document templates by themselves, if you use the :template:`path/to/template.html`
syntax in a docstring the resulting page will verify the path of that template with Django’s template loaders. This can be a handy way to check if the specified template exists and to show where on the filesystem that template is stored.
Included Bookmarklets
One bookmarklet is available from the admindocs
page:
- Documentation for this page
- Jumps you from any page to the documentation for the view that generates that page.
Using this bookmarklet requires that XViewMiddleware
is installed and that you are logged into the Django admin
as a User
with is_staff
set to True
.
Please login to continue.