README.md

Postgres audit database via triggers

This app sets up a postgres audit database via triggers. See https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Audit_trigger_91plus and https://github.com/2ndQuadrant/audit-trigger/ for more information.

Installation

pip install postgres_audit_triggers

Usage

• Add the postgres_audit_triggers app to INSTALLED_APPS before any apps that will be audited:

# settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = {
    'django.contrib.postgres',
    'postgres_audit_triggers',
    ...
}

• Install the postgres_audit_triggers middleware:

# settings.py
MIDDLEWARE = [
    ...
    'postgres_audit_triggers.middleware.AuditMiddleware',
]

This middleware will add metadata to the audit row. To send metadata, the client must send a Postgres-Audit-Triggers-Meta header in the request to your Django view. The data within that header must be JSON serializable to a python dictionary.

• Run migrations: python manage.py migrate postgres_audit_triggers

• Add audit_trigger = True to the Model Meta options of the models that will be audited:

# models.py
class MyAuditedModel(models.Model):
    ...
    class Meta:
        audit_trigger = True
        ...

• Make migrations: python manage.py makemigrations
• Run migrations: python manage.py migrate

Triggers introduce performance overhead. In certain cases, you may need to disable triggers while performing bulk operations. To turn off all triggers, a decorator is provided:

from postgres_audit_triggers.decorators import disable_triggers


@disable_triggers
def foo():
    # auditing will not be triggered on any database operations performed here
    Bar.objects.bulk_create(items)