Django: get last user visit date

Question

In Django, we can get the time user last logged in by using Auth.User.last_login. That is only updated when the user logs in using his username/password. Supp

Answer 1

The solution of @John Lehmann is wonderful. However, it requires using specific cache-based sessions settings to avoid database write on each request.

There are two options in cache-based sessions, backends.cache or backends.cached_db. The second one is a write-through cache, i.e. each modification to session data is written on both the database as well as cache. This provides persistency across restarts.

I have re-written the above to explicitly use the cache function and avoid many database writes.

from django.core.cache import cache
from django.utils import timezone
# other user model import

def last_visit_middleware(get_response):

    def middleware(request):
        """
        Save the time of last user visit
        """
        response = get_response(request)

        if request.session.session_key:
            key = "recently-seen-{}".format(request.session.session_key)
            recently_seen = cache.get(key)

            # is_authenticated hits db as it selects user row
            # so we will hit it only if user is not recently seen
            if not recently_seen and request.user.is_authenticated:
                UserAccount.objects.filter(id=request.user.id) \
                    .update(last_visit=timezone.now())

                visit_time = 60 * 30    # 30 minutes
                cache.set(key, 1, visit_time)

        return response

    return middleware

The records the time of last arrival or last visit. It does not record the time of last exit or "last seen".