How can I disable Django's admin in a deployed project, but keep it for local development?

Question

I am currently working in a Django project for which I need access to the admin area for local development, but want to disable it in the deployed site (for security reasons, am

Answer 1

First, establish a scheme so that your production server can have different settings than your development servers. A simple way to do that is with a source-control-ignored local_settings.py file, but there are many fancier ways to do it.

Then, in your settings.py file, put:

ADMIN_ENABLED = True

and in your production-only settings file, put:

ADMIN_ENABLED = False

Then in your urls.py:

if settings.ADMIN_ENABLED:
    urlpatterns += patterns('',
        (r'^admin/(.*)', include(admin.site.urls)),
        # ..maybe other stuff you want to be dev-only, etc...
        )

Answer 2

Extending @NedBatchelder 's answer, you might want to use proper if statement, like this:

if settings.ADMIN_ENABLED is True:
    ...

And also remove 'django.contrib.admin' from INSTALLED_APPS = [...], and use the same condition:

if settings.ADMIN_ENABLED is True:
    INSTALLED_APPS.append('django.contrib.admin')

This way the module wont be loaded, and for eg. collectstatic wont copy unnecessary static files used only in admin (fonts, images, css, js).

Answer 3

@madneon 's answer is terrific but requires an update and a small correction, and unfortunately the suggested edit queue is full.

For the first part, as it implies the use of @Ned Batchelder 's answer, the use of patterns() is no longer supported in Django 1.9 and above.

A current implemention could look like:

from django.conf import settings
from django.urls import path

urlpatterns = []

if settings.ADMIN_ENABLED is True:
    urlpatterns += [path('admin/', admin.site.urls),]

urlpatterns += [
   # ... Other paths
]

For the second part regarding appending to INSTALLED_APPS, this needs to go in the settings.py file and cannot be placed in the urls files.

As such, it should be written:

if ADMIN_ENABLED is True:
    INSTALLED_APPS.append('django.contrib.admin')

If you include settings. before ADMIN_ENABLED you'll get an error.