django-pghistory

django-pghistory provides automated and customizable history tracking for Django models using Postgres triggers. Users can configure a number of event trackers to snapshot every model change or to fire specific events when certain changes occur in the database.

In contrast with other Django auditing and history tracking apps (seen here), django-pghistory has the following advantages:

  1. No instrumentation of model and queryset methods in order to properly track history. After configuring your model, events will be tracked automatically with no other changes to code. In contrast with apps like django-reversion, it is impossible for code to accidentally bypass history tracking, and users do not have to use a specific model/queryset interface to ensure history is correctly tracked.

  2. Bulk updates and all other modifications to the database that do not fire Django signals will still be properly tracked.

  3. Historical event modeling is completely controlled by the user and kept in sync with models being tracked. There are no cumbersome generic foreign keys and little dependence on unstructured JSON fields for tracking changes, making it easier to use the historical events in your application (and in a performant manner).

  4. Changes to multiple objects in a request (or any level of granularity) can be grouped together under the same context. Although history tracking happens in Postgres triggers, application code can still attach metadata to historical events, such as the URL of the request, leading to a more clear and useful audit trail.

As mentioned, django-pghistory is built on top of Postgres triggers, meaning that historical event tracking happens at the database level. Because of this, history tracking data is 100% reliable and not susceptible to race conditions.

Along with this, django-pghistory provides the ability for users to make modeling decisions about how history is tracked that best suit their application needs. For example, pghistory.track allows one to track events to single fields, a combination of fields, or entire model updates only when relevant fields are updated or when conditions in the database hold true.

Although django-pghistory provides default history modeling out of the box for various scenarios, users have the ability to extend and customize models to suit their needs.

To get started, go to the Tutorial. The tutorial covers how to set up and configure automated event tracking in your application.

Also be sure to check out Extras for information about extra utilities in django-pghistory. This section covers some of the additional ways that one can access and aggregate event history. It also shows examples of how one can integrate history into the Django admin in place of it’s default history pages.