How to add custom view to django admin interface?

Question

My django admin interface looks like this:

Now I would like to add a view which does not correspond to a model.

I could overwrite the template of above page and add a custom link. But I think this would look ugly.

Example for overwriting admin/index.html:

{% extends "admin/index.html" %}

{% block content %}

{{ block.super }}
<div class="app-sonstiges module">
   ....
</div>
{% endblock %}

But maybe there is an official way to do add a custom view to the admin interface?

In my case I want to provide a form which can execute tcptraceroute to a remote server. The admin of my app needs this.

I used the same html tags. Now the link "tcptraceroute" looks nice, but unfortunately the messages moved down:

Is there a way to get a custom part like "Sontiges ... tcptraceroute" like in the screenshot, without moving the latest actions down?

Here is how the html structure looks like. My <div class="app-sonstiges"> is below content-main:

Answer 1

You have 3 options here:

Using third-party packages which provide menu

This is pretty straight forward, there are some good packages out there which support menu for admin, and some way to add your item to the menu.

An example of a 3rd party package would be django-admin-tools (last updated Dec 2021, checked April 2023). The drawback is that it is a bit hard to learn. Another option would be to use django-adminplus (last updated Oct 2019, checked April 2023) but at the time of writing this, it does not support Django 2.2.

Hacking with django admin templates

You can always extend admin templates and override the parts you want, as mentioned in @Sardorbek answer, you can copy some parts from admin template and change them the way you want.

Using custom admin site

If your views are supposed to only action on admin site, then you can extend adminsite (and maybe change the default), beside from adding links to template, you should use this method to define your admin-only views as it's easier to check for permissions this way.

Considering you already extended adminsite, now you can use the previous methods to add your link to template, or even extend get_app_list method, example:

class MyAdminSite(admin.AdminSite):
    def get_app_list(self, request):
        app_list = super().get_app_list(request)
        app_list += [
            {
                "name": "My Custom App",
                "app_label": "my_test_app",
                # "app_url": "/admin/test_view",
                "models": [
                    {
                        "name": "tcptraceroute",
                        "object_name": "tcptraceroute",
                        "admin_url": "/admin/test_view",
                        "view_only": True,
                    }
                ],
            }
        ]
        return app_list

You can also check if current staff user can access to module before you show them the links. It will look like this at then end:

Answer 2

Problem here that your div is not inside main-content. I suggest extending admin/index.html

Put in app/templates/admin/index.html

{% extends "admin/index.html" %}
{% load i18n static %}

{% block content %}
<div id="content-main">

{% if app_list %}
    {% for app in app_list %}
        <div class="app-{{ app.app_label }} module">
        <table>
        <caption>
            <a href="{{ app.app_url }}" class="section" title="{% blocktrans with name=app.name %}Models in the {{ name }} application{% endblocktrans %}">{{ app.name }}</a>
        </caption>
        {% for model in app.models %}
            <tr class="model-{{ model.object_name|lower }}">
            {% if model.admin_url %}
                <th scope="row"><a href="{{ model.admin_url }}">{{ model.name }}</a></th>
            {% else %}
                <th scope="row">{{ model.name }}</th>
            {% endif %}

            {% if model.add_url %}
                <td><a href="{{ model.add_url }}" class="addlink">{% trans 'Add' %}</a></td>
            {% else %}
                <td>&nbsp;</td>
            {% endif %}

            {% if model.admin_url %}
                {% if model.view_only %}
                <td><a href="{{ model.admin_url }}" class="viewlink">{% trans 'View' %}</a></td>
                {% else %}
                <td><a href="{{ model.admin_url }}" class="changelink">{% trans 'Change' %}</a></td>
                {% endif %}
            {% else %}
                <td>&nbsp;</td>
            {% endif %}
            </tr>
        {% endfor %}
        </table>
        </div>
    {% endfor %}

    <!-- here you could put your div -->
    <div class="app-sonstiges module">
    ....
    </div>
    <!-- here you could put your div -->
{% else %}
    <p>{% trans "You don't have permission to view or edit anything." %}</p>
{% endif %}
</div>
{% endblock %}

The another approach is to add custom app to app_list. But it is far more ugly. So I suggest overriding template.

I assume you are overriding get_urls in AdminSite.

Answer 3

If you need a custom page to handle user input (from form), you may want to give django-etc 1.3.0+ a try:

    from etc.admin import CustomModelPage

    class MyPage(CustomModelPage):
    
        title = 'My custom page'  # set page title

        # Define some fields you want to proccess data from.
        my_field = models.CharField('some title', max_length=10)

        def save(self):
            # Here implement data handling.
            super().save()

    # Register the page within Django admin.
    MyPage.register()

Answer 4

Note: I combined instructions in this answer and this answer:

• Implemented MyAdminSite with get_urls and get_app_list

    def get_urls(self):
        urls = super().get_urls()
        my_urls = [
            path("my-func", self.my_func, name="myfunc"),
        ]
        return my_urls + urls

    def get_app_list(self, request, **kwargs):
        """Show some links in the admin UI.

        See also https://stackoverflow.com/a/56476261"""
        app_list = super().get_app_list(request, kwargs)
        app_list += [
            {
                "name": "Other actions",
                "app_label": "other_actions_app",
                "models": [
                    {
                        "name": "my name",
                        "object_name": "my object name"my_admin:myfunc"),
                        "view_only": True,
                    }
                ],
            }
        ]
        return app_list

• Set admin_site = MyAdminSite(name="my_admin")
• Used @admin.register(MyObject, site=admin_site) with the site parameter but using admin from django.contrib
• Did not change settings (still uses django.contrib.admin)
• Put this line in my overall urls.py to load my registered:

admin_site._registry.update(admin.site._registry)

I know this seems weird, but it's the only thing that really worked for me, so I wanted to write it down in case it's useful for others.