Version number in Django applications

There are many places where you can store your app version number and a few methods that allow you to show it in django templates. A lot depends on the release tool you're using and your own preferences.

Below is the approach I'm using in my current project.

Put the version number into version.txt

I'm storing the app version number in the version.txt file. It's one of the locations the zest.releaser release tool (that I'm using) takes into account while doing a release.

The whole content of version.txt is just the app version number, for example: 1.0.1.dev0

Read the number to a variable in settings.py

...    
with open(version_file_path) as v_file:
    APP_VERSION_NUMBER = v_file.read()
...

Create a custom context processor

This paragraph and the following ownes are based on the wonderful answer by bcchun to Can I access constants in settings.py from templates in Django?

A custom context processor will allow you to add the app version number to the context of every rendered template. You won't have to add it manually every time you render a template (and usually you'll want to have the version number somewhere in the footer of every page).

Create context_processors.py file in your app directory:

from django.conf import settings

def selected_settings(request):
    # return the version value as a dictionary
    # you may add other values here as well
    return {'APP_VERSION_NUMBER': settings.APP_VERSION_NUMBER}

Add the context processor to settings.py

TEMPLATES = [{
    ...
    'OPTIONS': {
        'context_processors': [
            ...
            'your_app.context_processors.selected_settings'
        ],
    },
 }]

Use RequestContext or render in views

RequestContext and render populate the context with variables supplied by context_processors you set in settings.py.

Example:

def some_view(request):
    return render(request, 'content.html')

Use it in a template

...
<div>{% trans 'App version' %}:{{APP_VERSION_NUMBER}}</div>
....

I was looking for this exact same question, and found your question. The answer you accepted is not quite satisfactory to me.

I am working with django debugtoolbar, in there you can also show all versions of the apps used. I was wondering how to get the versions of my custom applications to show there as well.

Looking a bit further I found this question and answer: How to check the version of a installed application in Django in running time?

This answer however does not tell me where to put this __version__

So I looked in to an open application, which does show up in django toolbar. I looked in to the django restframework code, there I found out:

the version is put in the __init__.py file

(see https://github.com/tomchristie/django-rest-framework/blob/master/rest_framework/init.py)

and it is put here as:

__version__ = '2.2.7'
VERSION = __version__  # synonym

And after this, in his setup.py, he gets this version from this __init__.py : see: https://github.com/tomchristie/django-rest-framework/blob/master/setup.py

like this:

import re

def get_version(package):
    """
    Return package version as listed in `__version__` in `init.py`.
    """
    init_py = open(os.path.join(package, '__init__.py')).read()
    return re.match("__version__ = ['\"]([^'\"]+)['\"]", init_py).group(1)

version = get_version('rest_framework')

When using buildout and zestreleaser:

By the way, I am using buildout and zest.releaser for building and versioning.

In this case, above is a bit different (but basically the same idea):

see http://zestreleaser.readthedocs.org/en/latest/versions.html#using-the-version-number-in-setup-py-and-as-version

The version in setup.py is automatically numbered by setup.py, so in __init__.py you do:

import pkg_resources

__version__ = pkg_resources.get_distribution("fill in yourpackage name").version
VERSION = __version__  # synonym

Tags:

Django

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