Programmatically add URL Patterns in Django?

Question

Is there a way to programmatically add URL Patterns to Django without having to restart the server?

Or is there a way force Django to reprocess/cache URL patterns ( the URLconf )?

Answer 1

If you use gunicorn without code preloading, just send a HUP to the gunicorn master process, it will spawn new workers which load the new code, and gracefully shut down the old ones, without a single lost request!

Answer 2

I tried something like this by hacking some things in django.core.urlresolvers – it worked for me but note that it's a hack. I don't still have the code, but I did something like this:

1. Django typically uses urlresolvers.get_resolver() to get a RegexURLResolver which is responsible for resolving URLs. Passing None to this function gets your "root" URLConf.
2. get_resolver() uses a cache, _resolver_cache, for loaded URLConfs.
3. Resetting _resolver_cache should force Django to recreate a clean URLResolver.

Alternatively, you might try to unset the _urlconf_module attribute of the root RegexURLResolver, which should force Django to reload it (not sure about this though, it's possible that the module will be cached by Python).

from urlresolvers import get_resolver

delattr(get_resolver(None), '_urlconf_module')

Again, not guaranteed that this will work (I'm working from memory from code that I've obviously discarded for some reason). But django/core/urlresolvers.py is definitely the file you'll want to look at.

EDIT: Decided to experiment some with this and it didn't work...

EDIT2:

As I thought, your URL modules will be cached by Python. Simply reloading them as they change might work (using reload). If, your problem is that you're dynamically constructing urlpatterns based on some data which might change.

I tried reloading my root URLs (project.urls) and a suburl module (app.urls). That's all I had to do for the new URLs to be displayed by get_resolver(None).url_patterns

So the trick might be this simple: Manually reload your URL module.