Question

How do I set urlpatterns based on domain name or TLD, in Django?

For some links, Amazon shows url in native language based on its website tld.

http://www.amazon.de/bücher-buch-literatur/ ( de : books => bücher )

http://www.amazon.fr/Nouveautés-paraître-Livres/ ( fr : books => Livres )

http://www.amazon.co.jp/和書-ユーズドブッ-英語学習/ ( jp : books => 和書 )

( the links are incomplete and just show as samples. )

Is it possible to get host name in urls.py? (request object is not available in urls.py) or maybe in process_request of middleware and use it in urls.py(how???)

Any alternate suggestions how to achive this?

#---------- pseudocode ----------   website_tld = get_host(request).split('.')[-1]  #.fr French  : Books : Livres #.de German : Books : Bücher  if website_tld == 'fr':     lang_word = 'Livres' elif website_tld == 'de':     lang_word = 'Bücher' else:     lang_word = 'books'  urlpatterns = patterns('',                        url(r'^%s/$' % lang_word,books_view, name='books'),                        ) 

The url pattern needs to be built based on tld and later in the template, <a href='{% url books %}' >{% trans 'books' %}</a> to render html as <a href='Bücher'>Bücher</a> or <a href='Livres'>Livres</a>

Answer 1

You have to do this at the webserver level (for example using mod_rewrite in Apache) or with middleware (for example this snippet)

Also see this SO question

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Update: after your comment I thought about it some more. I liked Carl Meyer’s answer, but then realized it wouldn’t handle {% url %} reversing properly. So here’s what I would do:

Multiple sites: You need to use the Django sites framework. Which means making site instances for each language using the Django admin.

Multiple settings: Each language site will also have its own settings.py. The only differences between each site will be the SITE_ID and ROOT_URLCONF settings so, to follow DRY principle, you should keep the common settings in a different file and import them into the master file like this:

# settings_fr.py SITE_ID = 1 ROOT_URLCONF = 'app.urls_fr' from settings_common import *  # settings_de.py SITE_ID = 2 ROOT_URLCONF = 'app.urls_de' from settings_common import * 

… and so on.

Multiple URL conf: As implied above, a url conf for each site:

# urls_fr.py urlpatterns = patterns('',     url(r'^Livres/$', books_view, name='books'), )  # urls_de.py urlpatterns = patterns('',     url(r'^Bücher/$', books_view, name='books'), ) 

… and so on.

This way the url name (in this example ‘books’) is the same for all languages, and therefore {% url books %} will reverse properly and the domain name will be the domain_name field of the Site object with SITE_ID.

Multiple web server instances: In order for each SITE to work properly they each need their own server instances. For apache + mod_wsgi this means a different wsgi application for each SITE like this:

# site_fr.wsgi import os, sys, django.core.handlers.wsgi os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'app.settings_fr' application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler() 

… and so on along with matching apache virtual host for each site:

<VirtualHost *:80>     ServerName mybooks.fr     WSGIScriptAlias / /path/to/site_fr.wsgi     ... </VirtualHost> 

Hopefully this is clear 🙂