django-hitcount: simple app to count hits/views for an object

django-hitcount: a simply django application that allows you to count hits/views on a per object basis. This app came about as an answer to my own question at stackoverflow.com. Am hoping that others will find it useful.

This isn’t meant to be a full-fledged tracking application (see django-tracking) or a real analytic tool (try Google Analytics); rather, it’s meant to simply count the number of hits/view on an object-per-object basis.

How to install:

I find that the easiest way to work with django apps is to symbolically link them to my site-packages directory. It’s easier to update the apps with svn, git, or hg than it is to manually download the files and install by hand.

For me, this is what it looks like (you can cut and paste to make it easy):

• cd ~/src
• git clone git://github.com/thornomad/django-hitcount.git
• sudo ln -s `pwd`/django-hitcount/hitcount `python -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()"`/hitcount

Test it works by loading python and checking the version (should not get an error):

>>> import hitcount
>>> hitcount.__version__
'0.1 alpha'
>>>

Adding to your django project:

Add the hitcount app to your INSTALLED_APPS tuple and run syncdb.

There are two additional settings you can add to your settings.py file:

HITCOUNT_KEEP_HIT_ACTIVE = { 'days': 7 }
HITCOUNT_HITS_PER_IP_LIMIT = 0
HITCOUNT_EXCLUDE_USER_GROUP = ( 'Editor', )

HITCOUNT_KEEP_HIT_ACTIVE: is the number of days, weeks, months, hours, etc (timedelta kwargs), that an Hit is kept ‘active’. If a Hit is ‘active’ a repeat viewing will not be counted. After the active period ends, however, a new Hit will be recorded. You can decide how long you want this period to last …

HITCOUNT_HITS_PER_IP_LIMIT: limit the number of ‘active’ hits from a single IP address. 0 means that it is unlimited. You may want to set this, or not.

HITCOUNT_EXCLUDE_USER_GROUP: don’t count any hits from certain logged in users. In the example above, I don’t want any of my editors inflating the total Hit count.

Adding to your urls.py:

You need to add one line to your urls.py file.

You can have this url, itself, point to anywhere you like, but you need to keep the name='hitcount_update_ajax' constant.

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
from django.views.generic.list_detail import object_detail
from hitcount.views import update_hit_count_ajax

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^ajax/hit/$', # you can change this url if you would like
        update_hit_count_ajax,
        name='hitcount_update_ajax'), # keep this name the same

    # other views, for example my object view is:

    url(r'^/video/(?P<object_id>\d+)$', object_detail,
        {   'queryset': Video.objects.all(),
            'template_name': "video/view.html"},
            name='video_detail_view'),

)

Edit your templates

Add the javascript to your object_detail templates (or any template that handles a single object) so that our hit counter is called after the document loads.

Here is what my head includes:

{% load hitcount_tags %}
<script src="/media/js/jquery-latest.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
    $(document).ready(function() {
        {% get_hit_count_javascript for object %}
    });
--></script>

When the template is rendered, it should turn into something like this:

$(document).ready(function() {

$.post( '/ajax/hit/',
	{ hitcount_pk : '3' },
	function(data, status) {
		if (data.status == 'error') {
			// do something for error?
		}
	},
	'json');

});

Display the hits!

The most exciting part, is actually displaying your hits. There are four different ways to do it:

    - Return total hits for an object:
      {% get_hit_count for [object] %}

    - Get total hits for an object as a specified variable:
      {% get_hit_count for [object] as [var] %}

    - Get total hits for an object over a certain time period:
      {% get_hit_count for [object] within ["days=1,minutes=30"] %}

    - Get total hits for an object over a certain time period as a variable:
      {% get_hit_count for [object] within ["days=1,minutes=30"] as [var] %}

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 9:10 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Tags: django, python.