django-user-streams 0.5.0
django-user-streams is a Django app for creating news feeds (also known as activity streams) for users, notifying them of activity happening around your site. Optimised for speed, pluggability and simplicity.
News feed items are stored as a string and a timestamp. You can't store any additional metadata about the stream items, such as generic foreign keys to and Actor or a Target. You just store the item content as plain text (or HTML). If you need links to other objects, just insert an < a > tag.
Installation
You can install django-user-streams from PyPI:
pip install django-user-streams
Add user_streams to your INSTALLED_APPS setting. You also need a backend, which defines how your streams are stored. These are described below.
INSTALLED_APPS = [
...
'user_streams',
'user_streams.backends.single_table',
...
]
USER_STREAMS_BACKEND = 'user_streams.backends.single_table.SingleTableDatabaseBackend'
Finally, if you're using a backend that stores stream items using Django's model layer, run manage.py syncdb to create the necessary database tables.
API
Adding items to streams
To create a stream item:
import user_streams
user = User.objects.get(username='jamie')
user_streams.add_stream_item(user, 'This is the contents of the stream item')
The first argument to add_stream_item can be a single User instance, or a queryset representing multiple users. In the latter case, the message you supply is added to the stream of each user in the queryset.
import user_streams
user_streams.add_stream_item(User.objects.all(), 'Broadcast message to all users')
You can also specify the creation time for the stream item by passing a datetime.datetime instance as the value of the created_at argument.
import user_streams
from datetime import datetime
user = User.objects.get(username='jamie')
user_streams.add_stream_item(user, 'You have a new message!', created_at=datetime.now())
A note on time zones
By default, if you don't pass a created_at argument to add_stream_item, the value of datetime.datetime.now() will be used to timestamp your stream items. This is probably the least surprising behaviour, and if your app only ever deals with users in one timezone (and those users are in the same timezone as your web server), it's probably fine.
If your users are all over the world, however, this is a bad idea. The reasons for this are discussed in this blog post by Armin Ronacher. The best way to store timestamps in the database is to use the UTC timezone. You can then convert them to your users' local time at the last possible moment (when the datetime object is formatted for presentation to the user).
To support this, you can either provide the created_at argument every time you call the add_stream_item method:
user_streams.add_stream_item(user, 'You have a new message!', created_at=datetime.utcnow())
Alternatively, you can set the USER_STREAMS_USE_UTC setting (in your settings.py) to True (it's False by default). If you do this, datetime.utcnow() will be used instead of datetime.now() to generate the timestamps for each stream item.
If you do either of these things, the created_at property of each of your stream items will be set to UTC time. It's your responsibility to convert this to each user's local time for formatting. Take a look at times for an easy way to deal with that.
Getting the stream for a user
To retrieve the stream items for a user:
import user_streams
user = User.objects.get(username='jamie')
items = user_streams.get_stream_items(user)
This will return an iterable of objects, each of which is guaranteed to have two properties: created_at, which will be a datetime.datetime instance representing the creation timestamp of the message, and content, which will contain the contents of the message as a string. The objects will be ordered by their created_at field, with the most recent first. The iterable that is returned will be lazy, meaning that you can slice it (and pass it to a Django Paginator object) without loading all of the items from the database.
Backends
Stream storage is abstracted into Backend classes. Three backends are included with django-user-streams. Each backend is kept in a separate reusable app, which must be added to INSTALLED_APPS separately to the main user_streams app. This is to ensure that only the database tables required for each backend are created (assuming you are using a backend that stores data through Django's model layer).
Which backend you choose depends on the scale of your application, as well as your expected usage patterns. The pros and cons of each are described below.
SingleTableDatabaseBackend
user_streams.backends.single_table.SingleTableDatabaseBackend
The simplest backend. Your stream items are stored in a single database table, consisting of a foreign key to a User object, a DateTimeField timestamp, and a TextField to store your message. Fetching a stream for a user should be extremely fast, as no database joins are involved. The tradeoff is storage space: If you send a message to multiple users, the message is stored multiple times, once for each user. If you regularly broadcast messages to thousands of users, you may find that the table gets very large.
ManyToManyDatabaseBackend
user_streams.backends.many_to_many.ManyToManyDatabaseBackend
This backend stores your messages in a table with a ManyToManyField relationship to your User objects. Each message is only stored once, with a row in the intermediate table for each recipient. This means you need much less space for broadcast messages, but your queries may be slightly slower.
RedisBackend
user_streams.backends.redis.RedisBackend
Stores your messages in Redis sorted sets, one set for each user, with a Unix timestamp (the created_at attribute) as the score for each item. This approach is described in more detail here. The iterable returned by get_stream_items uses ZREVRANGE to retrieve each slice of the feed, and ZCARD to get the complete size of the set of items. This backend should be screamingly fast.
*Note: the Redis backend requires the redis-py library. Install with pip install redis.
Redis backend settings
The following settings control the behaviour of the Redis backend:
USER_STREAMS_REDIS_KEY_PREFIX
Each key generated by the backend will be prefixed with the value of this setting. The default prefix is "user_streams".
USER_STREAMS_REDIS_CLIENT_ARGUMENTS
A dictionary of keyword arguments which will be passed to the constructor of the Redis client instance.
Writing your own backend
You can create your own backend to store messages in whatever data store suits your application. Backends are simple classes which must implement two methods:
add_stream_item
add_stream_item(self, users, content, created_at)
users will be an iterable of User instances (you don't need to worry about accepting a single instance - your backend method will always be called with an iterable, which may be a list containing only one User.
content will be a string containing the stream message to store.
created_at will be a Python datetime.datetime object representing the time at which the stream item was created.
get_stream_items
get_stream_items(self, user)
This method should return an iterable of messages for the given User, sorted by timestamp with the newest first. Each item must be an object with two attributes: created_at (which must be a Python datetime.datetime object) and content (which must be a string containing the message contents).
While this method could simply return a list of messages, it's much more efficient to assume that the list will be paginated in some way, and support slicing and counting the objects on-demand, in whatever method your data store supports. To do this, you should return an iterable object, overriding __getitem__ and __len__. See the implementation of RedisBackend for an example.
Alternatives
https://github.com/justquick/django-activity-stream
Development
To contribute: fork the repository, make your changes, add some tests, commit, push to a feature branch, and open a pull request.
How to run the tests
Clone the repo, install the requirements into your virtualenv, then type python manage.py test user_streams. You can also use python manage.py test user_streams single_table many_to_many redis to run the tests for all the backends. Any of the above should also work if you've installed django-user-streams into an existing Django project (of course, only run the tests for the backend you're using).
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