Django: Dynamically add apps as plugin, building urls and other settings automatically

Question

I have following structure of my folders in Django:

./project_root
    ./app
       ./fixtures/
       ./static/
       ./templates/
       ./blog/
       ./         


        

Answer 1

What you'll want is something like this:

from django.utils.importlib import import_module
for app in settings.INSTALLED_APPS:

    try:
        mod = import_module('%s.urls' % app)
        # possibly cleanup the after the imported module?
        #  might fuss up the `include(...)` or leave a polluted namespace
    except:
        # cleanup after module import if fails,
        #  maybe you can let the `include(...)` report failures
        pass
    else:
        urlpatterns += patterns('',
            url(r'^%s/' % slugify(app), include('%s.urls' % app)
        )

You'll also want to steal and implement your own slugify from django template or utils (I'm not exactly sure where it lives these days?) and slightly modify it to strip out any 'dots' and other useless namespacing you don't want in your 'url' e.g. you might not want your urls looking like so: 'example.com/plugin.some_plugin_appname/' but like example.com/nice_looking_appname/

You might even not want it automagicly named after all, and instead made a configurable 'setting' in your plugins own 'settings' module or something like so:

# plugin settings conf
url_namespace = 'my_nice_plugin_url/'

# root urls.py:
url(r'^%s/' % mod.url_namespace, include(...))
# or:
url(r'^%s/' % app.settings.url_namespace, inc..

You probably get the gist of it.

Kind regards,