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Adding converted blog posts from old blog.
author Brian Neal <bgneal@gmail.com>
date Thu, 30 Jan 2014 21:45:03 -0600
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1 Upgrading to Django 1.6
2 #######################
3
4 :date: 2013-12-29 18:00
5 :tags: Django
6 :slug: upgrading-to-django-1.6
7 :author: Brian Neal
8
9 Getting started
10 ===============
11
12 `Django`_ 1.6 came out recently, which was soon followed by 1.6.1, and it looks
13 like 1.6.2 is on the way. I finally got around to upgrading two of my largest
14 sites. I thought I would make a list of what I changed at a high level for my
15 own reference. Perhaps someone else may find it useful as well.
16
17 In any event, I highly recommend you read the excellent `release notes`_ and
18 `deprecation timeline`_. The changes in 1.6 didn't seem groundbreaking, but
19 they were numerous. I spent a lot of time reading through the notes and trying
20 to decide if the issues affected me or not.
21
22 I recommend you run with warnings turned on::
23
24 $ python -Wall manage.py runserver
25
26 This will help you flag down issues in your code. If you aren't sure where
27 a warning is coming from, you can turn warnings into exceptions and get
28 a traceback (see the Python docs on the warnings_ library). Another trick is to
29 put a pdb_ breakpoint in the Django code before or after the warning, then you
30 can examine the call stack with the ``w`` command.
31
32 Upgrade Issues
33 ==============
34
35 Here are the issues that I ran into. Of course you may have a very different
36 experience depending on what features of Django you used and the details of
37 your site.
38
39 #. The location of the ``XViewMiddleware`` changed. I had to update my
40 ``MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES`` setting as a result.
41 #. Various ``get_query_set`` to ``get_queryset`` changes. The Django developers
42 have ironed out some naming inconsistencies in method names on both model
43 managers and ``ModelAdmin`` classes.
44 #. In template / form processing, the ``label_tag`` now includes the
45 ``label_suffix``. I noticed this when I saw that I had two colons on a form
46 field's label.
47 #. One very nice change that I am please to see is that Django now does test
48 discovery just like the unittest_ module in the standard library. To take
49 advantage of this I renamed all my test modules from ``view_tests.py`` to
50 ``test_views.py``, for example. This also let me get rid of ``import``
51 statements in various ``__init__.py`` files in test subdirectories. In other
52 words, you no longer have to have silly lines like
53 ``from view_tests import *`` in your test packages' ``__init__.py`` files.
54 #. Django now supports database connection persistence. To take advantage of
55 this you need to set the CONN_MAX_AGE_ setting to a non-zero value.
56 #. The ``CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_ANONYMOUS_ONLY`` setting is now deprecated and can be
57 removed. For various reasons explained in the notes this never really worked
58 right anyway.
59 #. Updated to version 1.0 of the django-debug-toolbar_. The version I was using
60 would not work in Django 1.6. It is so good to see that this project is
61 being actively maintained again. There are several new panels and neat
62 features, check it out!
63 #. You now get a warning if you have a ``ModelForm`` without an ``exclude`` or
64 ``fields`` meta option. This is rather nice as I have been bit by this in
65 the past when a form suddenly started showing a newly added field that it
66 should not have. I added a ``fields`` option to a ``ModelForm`` as a result.
67 Unfortunately some third party applications I am using have this problem as
68 well.
69 #. The ``cycle`` tag has new XSS_ protection. To make use of it now, you have
70 to add a ``{% load cycle from future %}`` tag into your templates.
71 #. The ``django.contrib.auth`` password reset function is now using base 64 encoding of the
72 ``User`` primary key. The details are `here <https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/releases/1.6/#django-contrib-auth-password-reset-uses-base-64-encoding-of-user-pk>`_. This affected me
73 because I am using a custom password reset URL, and thus I needed to update
74 my URL pattern for both the new parameter name and the regular expression
75 for base 64. I missed this originally and I started getting 404's on my
76 password reset confirmation URLs. And yes, this is something I should have a
77 test for!
78
79 What I didn't do
80 ================
81
82 Many of the warnings that I got came from third party modules that I have not
83 updated in a long time, including Celery_ and Haystack_. I am going to have to
84 schedule some time to update to the latest versions of these apps. Hopefully
85 the warnings will be fixed in the newer versions, but if not I can write
86 tickets or possibly submit patches / pull requests. This is the price of
87 progress I suppose.
88
89 I also use a couple of smaller third party applications that seem to be no
90 longer maintained. These apps are now generating some warnings. I'll have to
91 fork them and fix these myself. Luckily these projects are on GitHub so this
92 should not be a problem.
93
94 Finally I am still facing the problem of what to do about the deprecation of
95 the ``AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE`` and the ``get_profile`` method. This will be
96 removed in Django 1.7. I've been doing some more reading about this and I'm
97 less scared about this than I used to. I'll probably just change my profile
98 model to have a one-to-one relationship with the provided ``User`` model. I'll
99 have to do some more researching and thinking about this before Django 1.7.
100
101
102 Conclusion
103 ==========
104
105 Once again the upgrade process went smoother and quicker than I thought thanks
106 to the excellent release notes and the Django team's use of Python warnings to
107 flag deprecated features.
108
109
110 .. _Django: https://www.djangoproject.com/
111 .. _release notes: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/releases/1.6/
112 .. _deprecation timeline: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/internals/deprecation/
113 .. _warnings: http://docs.python.org/library/warnings.html
114 .. _pdb: http://docs.python.org/library/pdb.html
115 .. _unittest: http://docs.python.org/2/library/unittest.html
116 .. _CONN_MAX_AGE: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/ref/settings/#conn-max-age
117 .. _XSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting
118 .. _configurable user model: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/topics/auth/customizing/#auth-custom-user
119 .. _django-debug-toolbar: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-debug-toolbar
120 .. _Celery: http://www.celeryproject.org/
121 .. _Haystack: http://haystacksearch.org/