xedwin / django-tenancy

Handle multi-tenancy in Django with no additional global state using schemas.

django-tenancy

Handle multi-tenancy in Django with no additional global state using schemas.

Installation

Assuming you have django installed, the first step is to install django-tenancy:

pip install django-tenancy

Now you can import the tenancy module in your Django project.

Using django-tenancy

Define a Tenant Model

The tenant model must be a subclass of tenancy.models.AbstractTenant.

For instance, your myapp/models.py might look like:

from tenancy.models import AbstractTenant

class MyTenantModel(AbstractTenant):
   name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
   # other fields
   def natural_key(self):
      return (self.name, )

Important note: the natural_key method must return a tuple that will be used to prefix the model and its database table. This prefix must be unique to the tenant.

Declare the Tenant Model

Now that you have your tenant model, let's declare in your project in settings.py:

TENANCY_TENANT_MODEL = 'myapp.MyTenantModel'

Run a database synchronization to create the corresponding table:

python manage.py syncdb

Define the tenant-specific models

The tenant-specific models must subclass tenancy.models.TenantModel.

For instance, each tenant will have projects and reports. Here is how myapp/models.py might look like:

from tenancy.models import AbstractTenant, TenantModel

class MyTenantModel(AbstractTenant):
   name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
   # other fields
   def natural_key(self):
      return (self.name, )

class Project(TenantModel):
   name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
   description = models.CharField(max_length=300, blank=True, null=True)

class Report(TenantModel):
   name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
   content = models.CharField(max_length=300, blank=True, null=True)

Playing with the defined models

You can manipulate the tenant and tenant-specific models as any other Django models.

Create a tenant instance

tenant = MyTenantModel.objects.create("myfirsttenant")

Get a tenant-specific model: for_tenant()

<TenantModel>.for_tenant(<AbtractTenantConcreteSubclass instance>)

TenantModel comes with a method that allows you to get the specific AbstractTenantModel for a given Tenant instance. For instance:

tenant_project = Project.for_tenant(tenant)

Create a tenant-specific model instance

tenant_project.objects.create("myfirsttenant_project")

Python 3.5

An issue with circular references between Model objects prevent garbage collection of tenant specific models on tenant deletion.