Django clean urls.py
Managing URL mappings in Django can become a bit of a mess as a project grows, and you often end up with many tabs in your editor named urls.py which is not very helpful. In several discussions on the Unofficial Django Discord, cb109 kept mentioning that he’s got a single big urls.py file. At some point I started noticing every time I navigated to the wrong urls.py and how I got a little annoyed every time.
I made the switch to one big file to see how I liked it, and I am very happy I did. It’s much nicer, and my work project isn’t super large, so it’s only ~630 lines anyway. It’s much nicer to find stuff and add new path mappings. Highly recommend.
Nesting
After doing this a while I noticed that this pattern came up frequently:
path('projects/<project_pk>/', ProjectPage().as_view()),
path('projects/<project_pk>/duplicate/', duplicate_project),
path('projects/<project_pk>/ev/', ev_index),
path('projects/<project_pk>/ev/edit/', ev_edit),
...
Işık reminded me that include() in Django can clean that up:
path('projects/<project_pk>/', include([
path('', ProjectPage().as_view()),
path('duplicate/', duplicate_project),
path('ev/', ev_index),
path('ev/edit/', ev_edit),
])),
...
Not super clean, but better. I also didn’t like the verboseness of the iommi views like ProjectPage().as_view() which also felt a bit messy, so after a while I wrote this:
def path(path, view_or_list, kwargs=None):
if isinstance(view_or_list, list):
assert kwargs is None
return orig_path(path, include(view_or_list))
elif isinstance(view_or_list, type):
return orig_path(path, view_or_list().as_view(), kwargs=kwargs)
else:
try:
return orig_path(path, view_or_list.as_view(), kwargs=kwargs)
except AttributeError:
return orig_path(path, view_or_list, kwargs=kwargs)
Now the same path mapping can look like this:
path('projects/<project_pk>/', [
path('', ProjectPage),
path('duplicate/', duplicate_project),
path('ev/', [
path('', ev_index),
path('edit/', ev_edit),
]),
]),
...
The code above is hereby released in the public domain. Try it and see how you like it.