Question

I wrote a webservices application over django. This application can be found as several instances on our servers.

For example:

http://server1/testapp/
http://server2/sandboxapp/
http://server2/productionapp/

The app instances are hosted on apache2 through mod_wsgi.

I use cookie authentication for all of these instances, and would like the cookies for each not to overlap with the others. I need to set the SESSION_COOKIE_PATH value.

It happens that I don’t know beforehands the URLs behind which the application is deployed. So I’d like to use a reverse url to guess that value.

My main urls.py looks like this:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
     url(r'^$', view_server_root, {}, name='server_root'),
    ),
# here I also includes urls from the various sub-apps
for app in apps:
    urlpatterns.append(url(urlprefix,  include(app.urls))

I added this bit after all urls are loaded:

from django.core import urlresolvers
from django.conf import settings
settings.SESSION_COOKIE_PATH = urlresolvers.reverse('server_root')

Unfortunately urlresolvers.reverse('server_root') returns / and not the expected, for example, /testapp/. My cookies overlap if I log in to each instance.

Though, later on in the application usage, I use django.db.models.permalink for some views, which returns me a correct prefixed URL (e.g. /testapp/page/465).

There may be something with the context that is missing while executing urls.py.

Any ideas?

Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

You shouldn’t change Django settings at runtime. If you’re using Django 1.4 or later, you might be able to use reverse_lazy and set SESSION_COOKIE_PATH in your settings.py.

SESSION_COOKIE_PATH = reverse_lazy('server_root')