How to check whether a user is online in django template?

As the documentation says:

Even though normally you will check is_autheticated attribute on request.user to find out whether it has been populated by the AuthenticationMiddleware (representing the currently logged-in user), you should know this attribute is True for any User instance.

So to check if user is online I would do something like this:

models.py

class Profile(models.Model):
    user = models.OneToOneField(User, related_name='profile')           
    is_online = models.BooleanField(default=False)

views.py

from django.contrib.auth.signals import user_logged_in, user_logged_out
from django.dispatch import receiver    

@receiver(user_logged_in)
def got_online(sender, user, request, **kwargs):    
    user.profile.is_online = True
    user.profile.save()

@receiver(user_logged_out)
def got_offline(sender, user, request, **kwargs):   
    user.profile.is_online = False
    user.profile.save()

And then in your template you would check if user is online:

{% if user.profile.is_online %}
    Online
{% else %}
    Offline
{% endif %}

Don't forget to return user instance to your template in order for user.profile.is_online to work.

first install django-online-users by running

pip install django-online-users

then in your settings.py

INSTALLED_APPS = [
...
'online_users',] 
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
...
'online_users.middleware.OnlineNowMiddleware',)

Then in your views

import online_users.models



def see_users(self):

  user_status = online_users.models.OnlineUserActivity.get_user_activities(timedelta(seconds=60))
  users = (user for user in  user_status)
  context = {"online_users"}`

Pass the context to your template for example

{% for user in users %}
  {{user.user}}
{% endfor %}

This will output the users who have been active and online for the last 60 seconds

‌Thanks this excellent blog post, with slight modifications, I came up with a better solution, which uses memcache, hence less delay per request:

in models.py add:

from django.core.cache import cache 
import datetime
from myproject import settings

and add these method the userprofile class:

def last_seen(self):
    return cache.get('seen_%s' % self.user.username)

def online(self):
    if self.last_seen():
        now = datetime.datetime.now()
        if now > self.last_seen() + datetime.timedelta(
                     seconds=settings.USER_ONLINE_TIMEOUT):
            return False
        else:
            return True
    else:
        return False 

in userprofile folder add this middleware.py

import datetime
from django.core.cache import cache
from django.conf import settings

class ActiveUserMiddleware:

    def process_request(self, request):
        current_user = request.user
        if request.user.is_authenticated():
            now = datetime.datetime.now()
            cache.set('seen_%s' % (current_user.username), now, 
                           settings.USER_LASTSEEN_TIMEOUT)

in settings.py add 'userprofile.middleware.ActiveUserMiddleware', to MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES and also add:

    CACHES = {
        'default': {
            'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.memcached.MemcachedCache',
            'LOCATION': '127.0.0.1:11211',              
        }
    }

# Number of seconds of inactivity before a user is marked offline
USER_ONLINE_TIMEOUT = 300

# Number of seconds that we will keep track of inactive users for before 
# their last seen is removed from the cache
USER_LASTSEEN_TIMEOUT = 60 * 60 * 24 * 7

and in profile.html:

 <table>
   <tr><th>Last Seen</th><td>{% if profile.last_seen %}{{ profile.last_seen|timesince }}{% else %}awhile{% endif %} ago</td></tr>
   <tr><th>Online</th><td>{{ profile.online }}</td></tr>
 </table>

That's it!

To test cache in the console, to make sure that memcache works fine:

$memcached -vv
$ python manage.py shell
>>> from django.core.cache import cache
>>> cache.set("foo", "bar")
>>> cache.get("foo")
'bar'
>>> cache.set("foo", "zaq")
>>> cache.get("foo")
'zaq'

You can have an integer field for each user saying the number of sessions the user has logged in currently. You can increase that by 1 every time the user logs in somewhere, and reduce it by 1 when the user logs out somewhere.

{% if topic.creator.login_count %}
Online
{% else %}
Offline
{% endif %}

This is a simple way to solve this problem. You can refresh this data through an ajax request periodically.