Django: get last user visit date

Question

In Django, we can get the time user last logged in by using Auth.User.last_login. That is only updated when the user logs in using his username/password. Supp

Answer 1

This is my lastvisitmiddleware.py file which I have added in the settings.py file as a middleware

from django.utils.timezone import now
from myapp.models import UserLastVisit
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class LastVisitMiddleware:
    def __init__(self, get_response):
        self.get_response = get_response

    def __call__(self, request):
        if request.user.is_authenticated:
            # Update last visit time after request finished processing.
            user = User.objects.get(id=request.user.id)
            userLastVisit = UserLastVisit.objects.filter(user_id=user)
            if userLastVisit:
                userLastVisit.update(last_visit=now())
            else:
                UserLastVisit.objects.create(user_id=user, last_visit=now())

        response = self.get_response(request)
        return response

setings.py file

MIDDLEWARE = [
   ...
   'mysite.lastvisitmiddleware.LastVisitMiddleware',
   ...
]

models.py

class UserLastVisit(models.Model):
    user_id = models.ForeignKey(User, models.DO_NOTHING, db_column='user_id')
    last_visit = models.DateTimeField()

This solution worked for me. Now, every time a user visits the site, the UserLastVisit table will be updated with the latest last_visit. One problem in that is if user travel between different pages, then also the last visit will be updated. We can use a time range like 24 hrs or something like that to update it only once in that time range. It combines multiple approaches from the answers available on this thread

Answer 2

The same as John Lehmann's middleware, but rewritten as a function with Andrew Swihart's suggestions and tested on Django 2.2:

 def last_user_activity_middleware(get_response):

    def middleware(request):

        response = get_response(request)

        key = "last-activity"

        if request.user.is_authenticated:

            last_activity = request.session.get(key)

            # If key is old enough, update database.
            too_old_time = timezone.now() - td(seconds=60 * 60)
            if not last_activity or parse(last_activity) < too_old_time:
                MyUser.objects.filter(email=request.user).update(
                    last_visit=timezone.now(),
                    login_count=F('login_count') + 1)

            request.session[key] = timezone.now().isoformat()

        return response

    return middleware

Learn more about writing own middleware in official documentation: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.2/topics/http/middleware/#writing-your-own-middleware

Answer 3

Taking into account @John Lehmann solution and @Andrew Swihart suggestions, I came up with this code for newer versions of Django (> 2.0):

from datetime import timedelta as td
from django.utils import timezone
from django.conf import settings
from django.db.models.expressions import F
from dateutil.parser import parse

from .models import Account


class AccountLoginMiddleware:

    def __init__(self, get_response):
        self.get_response = get_response

    def __call__(self, request):
        if request.user.is_authenticated:
            last_activity = request.session.get('last-activity')

            too_old_time = timezone.now() - td(seconds=settings.LOGIN_INTERVAL)
            if not last_activity or parse(last_activity) < too_old_time:
                Account.objects.filter(username=request.user.username).update(
                    login_last=timezone.now(),
                    login_count=F('login_count') + 1)

            request.session['last-activity'] = timezone.now().isoformat()

        response = self.get_response(request)

        return response

Answer 4

Here's a middleware that will keep track of user last activity and count separated by intervals of time. Using the interval creates discrete "sessions" which can be tracked/counted along with the benefit of minimizing writes to the database.

Every time an auth user performs a request, will hit the cache to find their last activity, and then update the cache with a new timestamp. If the activity has had a gap of at least "interval" time, then it will update the database timestamp.

from datetime import timedelta as td
from django.utils import timezone
from django.conf import settings
from django.db.models.expressions import F    
from <user profile path> import UserProfile  

class LastUserActivityMiddleware(object):
    KEY = "last-activity"

    def process_request(self, request):
        if request.user.is_authenticated():
            last_activity = request.session.get(self.KEY)

            # If key is old enough, update database.
            too_old_time = timezone.now() - td(seconds=settings.LAST_ACTIVITY_INTERVAL_SECS)
            if not last_activity or last_activity < too_old_time:
                UserProfile.objects.filter(user=request.user.pk).update(
                        last_login=timezone.now(),
                        login_count=F('login_count') + 1)

            request.session[self.KEY] = timezone.now()

        return None

Comments:

1. How you define settings.LAST_ACTIVITY_INTERVAL_SECS determine what constitutes the interval of non-activity considered to be a new login.
2. This updates a "UserProfile" object which I have 1:1 with my User objects, but you can update any object you please.
3. Make sure to include this in settings.MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES.
4. Note this middleware uses process_request not process_response otherwise depending on middleware order, APPEND_SLASH may cause request.user to be unavailable as discussed: Django: WSGIRequest' object has no attribute 'user' on some pages?

Answer 5

Example model:

class User(models.Model):
    last_visit = models.DateTimeField(...)
    ...

Example middleware which will be executed for all logged-in users:

from django.utils.timezone import now

class SetLastVisitMiddleware(object):
    def process_response(self, request, response):
        if request.user.is_authenticated():
            # Update last visit time after request finished processing.
            User.objects.filter(pk=request.user.pk).update(last_visit=now())
        return response

Add the new middleware to Your settings.py:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    ...
    'path.to.your.SetLastVisitMiddleware',
    ...
)

Warning: not tested, but doesn't require external packages to be installed and it's only 5 lines of code.

See more in the docs about Middleware and custom user models (since Django 1.5)

Answer 6

The solution of @John Lehmann is wonderful. However, it requires using specific cache-based sessions settings to avoid database write on each request.

There are two options in cache-based sessions, backends.cache or backends.cached_db. The second one is a write-through cache, i.e. each modification to session data is written on both the database as well as cache. This provides persistency across restarts.

I have re-written the above to explicitly use the cache function and avoid many database writes.

from django.core.cache import cache
from django.utils import timezone
# other user model import

def last_visit_middleware(get_response):

    def middleware(request):
        """
        Save the time of last user visit
        """
        response = get_response(request)

        if request.session.session_key:
            key = "recently-seen-{}".format(request.session.session_key)
            recently_seen = cache.get(key)

            # is_authenticated hits db as it selects user row
            # so we will hit it only if user is not recently seen
            if not recently_seen and request.user.is_authenticated:
                UserAccount.objects.filter(id=request.user.id) \
                    .update(last_visit=timezone.now())

                visit_time = 60 * 30    # 30 minutes
                cache.set(key, 1, visit_time)

        return response

    return middleware

The records the time of last arrival or last visit. It does not record the time of last exit or "last seen".