Question

I have two apps in my Django project: a public-facing app, and a management app (not django’s built-in admin site). I want one domain name to point to the public site and another to point to the management site. (i.e. so the /index.html route, for example, would point to a view in a different app depending on the domain name.) Each app has its own URLconf and they are both being included into the main URLconf. What’s the best way to do this?

Answer 1

There are many ways, here are some which can work for you depending on your specific constraints.

1. Light hack: blacklist or whitelist urls in the HTTP server configuration for each domain

2. Monkey patch the url router to check for the request[‘META’][‘HTTP_HOST’], because it’s definitively not available at the time urls are being configured

3. 2 Django instances: make 2 settings files:

   • Make one urls script per site,

   • Make one settings per site as such

   • Run one Django instance per domain

Example settings files:

management_settings.py

from settings import *
ROOT_URLCONF='management_urls.py'

public_settings.py

from settings import *
ROOT_URLCONF='public_urls.py'

And run one Django server on each. Don’t forget to use the –settings switch for management commands as such:

# run public
./manage.py runserver --settings public_settings
# run management
./manage.py runserver --settings management_settings