How to create multiple versions of a site in django but run under same domain but different url

Question

I have a website i developed with django and i want it to have 2 different front-end designs but same functionality. something very similar to django multi-language functionality. So i want a user to be able to access the two designs from different url by specifying the version ie

localhost:8000/v1

localhost:8000/v2

I created a middleware to check the current version and revert to a default if non is found.
middleware

class VersioningMiddleware(MiddlewareMixin):

def process_request(self, request):
    path = request.get_full_path()
    tokens = path.split("/")
    if len(tokens) > 1:
        if tokens[1] in APP_VERSIONS: # APP_VERSION is a list ['v1','v2',...]
            request.app_version = tokens[1]
    new_url = "v1%s" % path
    return HttpResponseRedirect(new_url)

and also i mapped out all app url conf using this

urlpatterns = [
path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
url(r'^(?P<version>[a-z][0-9])?/', include('base.all_urls','')),]

So the problem with this approach is that all my views are expected to take an optional parameter version which i dont like.

So i need a better way to achieve this without having to have different codebase for different version. If i could pass the version to the view without having to specify the optional parameter to all my views, my plan is to use that version to render the appropriate template that each view render.

thanks in advance

Answer 1

As you said you need different versions for a frontend only and keep the functionality same.

For the frontend, you just need to change js and css

Add "django.core.context_processors.request" to MIDDLEWARE of your settings.py so that Django template would be able to access query parameters in request across all templates in the whole project

settings.py

MIDDLEWARE = [
    ...
    ...
    "django.core.context_processors.request",
]

Now in your template file, you will be able to retrieve the query parameter and evaluate directly

{% if request.GET.version == 'v2' %} 
    loading version two... write tags, load here css,js to be loaded if version is v2
{% elif request.GET.version == 'v1' %}
    loading version two... write tags, load here css,js to be loaded if version is v1
{% else %}
    loading defaults.. write tags, load default css,js to be loaded if no version queried by user
{% endif %}

your URL would be like:

for v2

localhost:8000/?version=v2

for v1

localhost:8000/?version=v1

if nothing specified - default

localhost:8000

Benefits -

• No need to write about this frontend versioning in backend views or urls file

• Only change in HTML template can allow changing the version of the frontend