Django: signal when user logs in?

Question

In my Django app, I need to start running a few periodic background jobs when a user logs in and stop running them when the user logs out, so I am looking for an elegant way

Answer 1

Inferring logout, as opposed to having them explicitly click a button (which nobody does), means picking an amount of idle time that equates to "logged out". phpMyAdmin uses a default of 15 minutes, some banking sites use as little as 5 minutes.

The simplest way of implementing this would be to change the cookie-lifetime. You can do this for your entire site by specifying settings.SESSION_COOKIE_AGE. Alternatively, you could change it on a per-user basis (based on some arbitrary set of criteria) by using HttpResponse.setcookie(). You can centralize this code by creating your own version of render_to_response() and having it set the lifetime on each response.