Debugging Django in Production Revisited¶

In a previous post I talked about a neat middleware to debug production environments in Django. It basically checked to see if you were a superuser, or if you were in settings.INTERNAL_IPS, and if so, then it displayed a technical 500 page for you (The yellow one you know and love). Anyway, at that point it was more of a simple idea, and not really used in production.

At work the other day I was working on a bug that was only showing up in production, and not on staging. I remember back to this middleware and thought it would be perfect. Anyway, at work we have a lot of non-technical people that are superusers (think my bosses boss). We also all have the same external IP’s when at work, so none of the previous methods I had would work for this.

Thinking about it, and talking to my co-worker Ben Spaulding, we thought that Django has Groups built in, so why not use that? So I went ahead and re-jiggered the middleware to be based around groups.

from django.views.debug import technical_500_response from django.contrib.auth.models import Group from django.core.cache import cache import sys class UserBasedExceptionMiddleware ( object ): def process_exception ( self , request , exception ): users = cache . get ( 'technical_error_users' ) if not users : skip = cache . get ( 'no_technical_error_users' ) if skip : return None try : g = Group . objects . get ( name = 'Technical Errors' ) users = g . user_set . all () cache . set ( 'technical_error_users' , users , 60 ) except Group . DoesNotExist : cache . set ( 'no_technical_error_users' , True , 60 * 60 ) return None if request . user in users and request . user . is_superuser : return technical_500_response ( request , * sys . exc_info ()) return None

Since it is middleware, I went ahead and decided to use the cache framework to make sure that we weren’t doing a DB query on every request. Also, I had to account for the case when the group hasn’t been added yet, so when that happens, it caches the fact and doesn’t check again for another hour. If the Technical Errors group exists, it caches the members that are in it for a minute. This means that a DB query only happens every minute, which is fine.

I’d be curious how other people might improve this, as it seems a little bit janky still. However, it works for us, and is incredibly useful when debugging. Instead of getting a link to a broken page, you go to the page and get a nice 500, telling you exactly what went wrong.

I can think of one basic improvement in just writing this post, which would be to import settings and to just return None if DEBUG was True, or if the CACHE_BACKEND was set to None. This would allow it to stay out of the way if there was no caching, or the Technical 500 was already going to be raised.

I do think that this middleware removes a lot of the reason to run a site under DEBUG=True, so hopefully it will result in less sites launching with DEBUG on.