Django 2.1 release notes¶

Model “view” permission¶

A “view” permission is added to the model Meta.default_permissions. The new permissions will be created automatically when running migrate.

This allows giving users read-only access to models in the admin. ModelAdmin.has_view_permission() is new. The implementation is backwards compatible in that there isn’t a need to assign the “view” permission to allow users who have the “change” permission to edit objects.

There are a couple of backwards incompatible considerations.

Minor features¶

Database backend API¶

This section describes changes that may be needed in third-party database backends.

• To adhere to PEP 249, exceptions where a database doesn’t support a feature are changed from NotImplementedError to django.db.NotSupportedError.
• Renamed the allow_sliced_subqueries database feature flag to allow_sliced_subqueries_with_in.
• DatabaseOperations.distinct_sql() now requires an additional params argument and returns a tuple of SQL and parameters instead of an SQL string.
• DatabaseFeatures.introspected_boolean_field_type is changed from a method to a property.

django.contrib.gis¶

• Support for SpatiaLite 4.0 is removed.

Dropped support for MySQL 5.5¶

The end of upstream support for MySQL 5.5 is December 2018. Django 2.1 supports MySQL 5.6 and higher.

Dropped support for PostgreSQL 9.3¶

The end of upstream support for PostgreSQL 9.3 is September 2018. Django 2.1 supports PostgreSQL 9.4 and higher.

Removed BCryptPasswordHasher from the default PASSWORD_HASHERS setting¶

If you used bcrypt with Django 1.4 or 1.5 (before BCryptSHA256PasswordHasher was added in Django 1.6), you might have some passwords that use the BCryptPasswordHasher hasher.

You can check if that’s the case like this:

from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model
User = get_user_model()
User.objects.filter(password__startswith='bcrypt$$')

If you want to continue to allow those passwords to be used, you’ll have to define the PASSWORD_HASHERS setting (if you don’t already) and include 'django.contrib.auth.hashers.BCryptPasswordHasher'.

Moved wrap_label widget template context variable¶

To fix the lack of <label> when using RadioSelect and CheckboxSelectMultiple with MultiWidget, the wrap_label context variable now appears as an attribute of each option. For example, in a custom input_option.html template, change {% if wrap_label %} to {% if widget.wrap_label %}.

SameSite cookies¶

The cookies used for django.contrib.sessions, django.contrib.messages, and Django’s CSRF protection now set the SameSite flag to Lax by default. Browsers that respect this flag won’t send these cookies on cross-origin requests. If you rely on the old behavior, set the SESSION_COOKIE_SAMESITE and/or CSRF_COOKIE_SAMESITE setting to None.

Considerations for the new model “view” permission¶

class MyAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    def get_form(self, request, obj=None, **kwargs):
        if not self.has_change_permission(request, obj):
            return super().get_form(request, obj, **kwargs)
        return CustomForm

Miscellaneous¶

• The minimum supported version of mysqlclient is increased from 1.3.3 to 1.3.7.
• Support for SQLite < 3.7.15 is removed.
• The date format of Set-Cookie’s Expires directive is changed to follow RFC 7231#section-7.1.1.1 instead of Netscape’s cookie standard. Hyphens present in dates like Tue, 25-Dec-2018 22:26:13 GMT are removed. This change should be merely cosmetic except perhaps for antiquated browsers that don’t parse the new format.
• allowed_hosts is now a required argument of private API django.utils.http.is_safe_url().
• The multiple attribute rendered by the SelectMultiple widget now uses HTML5 boolean syntax rather than XHTML’s multiple="multiple".
• HTML rendered by form widgets no longer includes a closing slash on void elements, e.g. <br>. This is incompatible within XHTML, although some widgets already used aspects of HTML5 such as boolean attributes.
• The value of SelectDateWidget’s empty options is changed from 0 to an empty string, which mainly may require some adjustments in tests that compare HTML.
• User.has_usable_password() and the is_password_usable() function no longer return False if the password is None or an empty string, or if the password uses a hasher that’s not in the PASSWORD_HASHERS setting. This undocumented behavior was a regression in Django 1.6 and prevented users with such passwords from requesting a password reset. Audit your code to confirm that your usage of these APIs don’t rely on the old behavior.
• Since migrations are now loaded from .pyc files, you might need to delete them if you’re working in a mixed Python 2 and Python 3 environment.
• Using None as a JSONField lookup value now matches objects that have the specified key and a null value rather than objects that don’t have the key.
• The admin CSS class field-box is renamed to fieldBox to prevent conflicts with the class given to model fields named “box”.
• Since the admin’s actions.html, change_list_results.html, date_hierarchy.html, pagination.html, prepopulated_fields_js.html, search_form.html, and submit_line.html templates can now be overridden per app or per model, you may need to rename existing templates with those names that were written for a different purpose.
• QuerySet.raw() now caches its results like regular querysets. Use iterator() if you don’t want caching.
• The database router allow_relation() method is called in more cases. Improperly written routers may need to be updated accordingly.
• Translations are no longer deactivated before running management commands. If your custom command requires translations to be deactivated (for example, to insert untranslated content into the database), use the new @no_translations decorator.
• Management commands no longer allow the abbreviated forms of the --settings and --pythonpath arguments.
• The private django.db.models.sql.constants.QUERY_TERMS constant is removed. The get_lookup() and get_lookups() methods of the Lookup Registration API may be suitable alternatives. Compared to the QUERY_TERMS constant, they allow your code to also account for any custom lookups that have been registered.
• Compatibility with py-bcrypt is removed as it’s unmaintained. Use bcrypt instead.

Miscellaneous¶

• The ForceRHR GIS function is deprecated in favor of the new ForcePolygonCW function.
• django.utils.http.cookie_date() is deprecated in favor of http_date(), which follows the format of the latest RFC.
• {% load staticfiles %} and {% load admin_static %} are deprecated in favor of {% load static %}, which works the same.
• django.contrib.staticfiles.templatetags.static() is deprecated in favor of django.templatetags.static.static().
• Support for InlineModelAdmin.has_add_permission() methods that don’t accept obj as the second positional argument will be removed in Django 3.0.