Accessing the user's request in a post_save signal

Can't be done. The current user is only available via the request, which is not available when using purely model functionality. Access the user in the view somehow.

I was able to do it by inspecting the stack and looking for the view then looking at the local variables for the view to get the request. It feels like a bit of a hack, but it worked.

import inspect, os

@receiver(post_save, sender=MyModel)
def get_user_in_signal(sender, **kwargs):
    for entry in reversed(inspect.stack()):
        if os.path.dirname(__file__) + '/views.py' == entry[1]:
            try:
                user = entry[0].f_locals['request'].user
            except:
                user = None
            break
    if user:
        # do stuff with the user variable

Ignacio is right. Django's model signals are intended to notify other system components about events associated with instances and their respected data, so I guess it's valid that you cannot, say, access request data from a model post_save signal, unless that request data was stored on or associated with the instance.

I guess there are lots of ways to handle it, ranging from worse to better, but I'd say this is a prime example for creating class-based/function-based generic views that will automatically handle this for you.

Have your views that inherit from CreateView, UpdateView or DeleteView additionally inherit from your AuditMixin class if they handle verbs that operate on models that need to be audited. The AuditMixin can then hook into the views that successfully create\update\delete objects and create an entry in the database.

Makes perfect sense, very clean, easily pluggable and gives birth to happy ponies. Flipside? You'll either have to be on the soon-to-be-released Django 1.3 release or you'll have to spend some time fiddlebending the function-based generic views and providing new ones for each auditing operation.