Question

The task is simple:

If user visits site root then:
    if user is authenticated then:
        redirect to /dashboard/
    else:
        redirect to settings.LOGIN_URL

There are many ways to implement that, but I wonder if there is such way in which I do need to use only urls.py.

I found a solution with RedirectView login_required(RedirectView.as_view(url=my_url)), however then I can only write static my_url instead of reverse(), which is not flexible.

Answer 1

You could use reverse_lazy (Django 1.4) in you url configuration, like so:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import url, patterns
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse_lazy
from django.shortcuts import redirect

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^/$', lambda request: return redirect(reverse_lazy('url_name')),
)

Another possibility is to define LOGIN_URL using reverse_lazy, so you could continue to use settings.LOGIN_URL in your redirects.

_{Code is untested, might have a typo somewhere.}