How can I disable Django's admin in a deployed project, but keep it for local development?

Question

I am currently working in a Django project for which I need access to the admin area for local development, but want to disable it in the deployed site (for security reasons, among others).

How can I achieve this programmatically (ie using settings.py).

Many thanks.

Answer 1

First, establish a scheme so that your production server can have different settings than your development servers. A simple way to do that is with a source-control-ignored local_settings.py file, but there are many fancier ways to do it.

Then, in your settings.py file, put:

ADMIN_ENABLED = True 

and in your production-only settings file, put:

ADMIN_ENABLED = False 

Then in your urls.py:

if settings.ADMIN_ENABLED:     urlpatterns += patterns('',         (r'^admin/(.*)', include(admin.site.urls)),         # ..maybe other stuff you want to be dev-only, etc...         ) 

Answer 2

Extending @NedBatchelder 's answer, you might want to use proper if statement, like this:

if settings.ADMIN_ENABLED is True:     ... 

And also remove 'django.contrib.admin' from INSTALLED_APPS = [...], and use the same condition:

if settings.ADMIN_ENABLED is True:     INSTALLED_APPS.append('django.contrib.admin') 

This way the module wont be loaded, and for eg. collectstatic wont copy unnecessary static files used only in admin (fonts, images, css, js).