django-activeusers aims to keep track of currently active users on Django-powered Web sites.

It is a reworked, simplified fork of django-tracking located at http://bitbucket.org/codekoala/django-tracking.

Features

• Tracks the following information about your visitors:

  • Session key
  • IP address
  • User agent
  • Whether or not they are a registered user and logged in
  • Where they came from (http-referer)
  • What page on your site they last visited
  • How many pages on your site they have visited

• Automatic clean-up of old visitor records

• The ability to have a live feed of active users on your website

• Template tags to:

  • display how many active users there are on your site
  • determine how many active users are on the same page within your site

Requirements

• Django 1.2+

Installation

Download django-activeuesers using one of the following methods:

pip

pip install -e git+http://github.com/asavoy/django-activeusers.git#egg=django-activeusers

Configuration

First of all, you must add this project to your list of INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    ...
    'django-activeusers',
    ...
)

Run manage.py syncdb. This creates a few tables in your database that are necessary for operation.

Depending on how you wish to use this application, you have a few options:

Visitor Tracking

Add django-activeusers.middleware.VisitorTrackingMiddleware to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES in settings.py. It must be underneath the AuthenticationMiddleware, so that request.user exists.

Automatic Visitor Clean-Up

If you want to have Django automatically clean past visitor information out your database, put django-activeusers.middleware.VisitorCleanUpMiddleware in your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES.

Visitors on Page (template tag)

Make sure that django.core.context_processors.request is somewhere in your TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS tuple. This context processor makes the request object accessible to your templates. This application uses the request object to determine what page the user is looking at in a template tag.

If you don't want particular areas of your site to be tracked, you may define a list of prefixes in your settings.py using the ACTIVEUSERS_IGNORE_PREFIXES. For example, if you didn't want visits to the /family/ section of your website, set ACTIVEUSERS_IGNORE_PREFIXES to ['/family/'].

By default, active users include any visitors within the last 10 minutes. If you would like to override that setting, just set ACTIVEUSERS_TIMEOUT to however many minutes you want in your settings.py.

For automatic visitor clean-up, any records older than 24 hours are removed by default. If you would like to override that setting, set ACTIVEUSERS_CLEANUP_TIMEOUT to however many hours you want in your settings.py.

Good luck! Please contact me with any questions or concerns you have with the project!