This app makes urls usage DRYer. It maps URL keywords to a model object instance by passing the object instance as argument to the URL.

In short, having an article model instance, you can write this:

<a href="{{ url('article:detail', article) }}">View this article</a>

While you have been writing this so far:

<a href="{{ url('article:detail', year=article.year, month=article.month, slug=article.slug) }}">View this article</a>

This is for your templates as well as for your reverse() and preserves other urls to work.

Right now it is build for Jinja2 using the easy-to-use Jingo adapter. If you are using plain Django template, refer to version 0.3.1. A new version for plain Django should come out later on.

Download via pip

pip install django-model-urls

or get the bleeding edge version:

pip install git+https://github.com/vinyll/django-model-urls.git

Add model_urls to your settings file:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'jingo',
    'model_urls',
)

And you're done!

In the examples below we will consider this model:

class Article(models.Model):
    slug = models.SlugField()
    title = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    date = models.DateField()

    @property
    def year(self):
        return self.date.year

    @property
    def month(self):
        return self.date.month

and this urls:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^article/(?P<year>\d{4})/(?P<month>\d{2})/(?P<slug>[\w-]+)/$',
        ArticleView.as_view(), name="article_details"),
)

and article being an instance of the Article class.

url('article_details', article)

from model_urls.urlresolvers import reverse

reverse('article_details', article)

Both will generate a url in this format:

/2014/11/how-to-optimize-django-urls/

Basically you should be able to use url() and reverse() in all cases. However, these tools are also available:

• url(viewname, *args, **kwargs) will try to detect an instance in arguments and choose wheter to use simple_url() or model_url() otherwise.
• simple_url(viewname, *args, **kwargs) is an alias to Jingo's url() helper to force using it.
• model_url(viewname, instance, *args, **kwargs) will generate the url from the instance in first argument.

These functions are available in model_urls.urlresolvers.

• model_reverse(viewname, instance, urlconf=None, args=None, kwargs=None, prefix=None, current_app=None) will generate the url based on the instance properties.
• reverse(viewname, *args, **kwargs) will fallback to model_reverse() if an instance is found in arguments or to Django's reverse() otherwise.

An optional configuration is for your settings is:

MODEL_URLS_HELPER_OVERRIDE = False

This option will not allow the Jingo's url() helper to be overriden by the one from model_urls.

In this case you should use model_url() to use an instance.

A common use case is switching from pk based url to slug. Using django-model-urls means updating the urls.py file to consider slug without altering views or template files.

Refer to tests.py to see more usages.