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Show HN: Django Control Room – All Your Tools Inside the Django Admin (github.com)

134 points by yassi_dev ↗ HN
Over the past year I’ve been building a set of operational panels for Django:

- Redis inspection - cache visibility - Celery task introspection - URL discovery and testing

All of these tools have been built inside the Django admin.

Instead of jumping between tools like Flower, redis-cli, Swagger, or external services, I wanted something that sits where I’m already working.

I’ve grouped these under a single umbrella: Django Control Room.

The idea is pretty simple: the Django admin already gives you authentication, permissions, and a familiar interface. It can also act as an operational layer for your app.

Each panel is just a small Django app with a simple interface, so it’s easy to build your own and plug it in.

I’m working on more panels (signals, errors, etc.) and also thinking about how far this pattern can go.

Curious how others think about this. Does it make sense to consolidate this kind of tooling inside the admin, or do you prefer keeping it separate?

23 comments

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dec0dedab0de
i like it, but I think i would rather have a proxy, or atleast an auth redirect to those different tools.

I used to have flower at myapp.com/flower using an auth redirect in nginx to a simple view in django that made sure it was an admin user. I think if you can make that setup easier to leverage existing tools that would be nicer than rebuilding everything.

drchaim
Good idea. If you add a kind of skill/prompt you’ll get a lot of other components from the community ;)
dzonga
this is pretty dope
izzie1234
I love this idea. I see the AI era having 2 competing views when building something new:

1. Build X with pure <language of choice>. Why? LLMs will have less context needed, and onboarding engineers would be easier since there’ll be less overhead and opinionated frameworks knowledge required

2. Build X using well establish frameworks. Painful in the beginning since you’ll not only need language knowledge, but framework knowledge. The upshot, is scaling and maintainability

I love that this ecosystem will heavily pressure teams to consider (2) more and more — solving the very real “AI slop” problem

simonw
I like the way each panel is its own separate package on PyPI and the system picks them up via setuptools entry points. It's a neat implementation of a plugin pattern.
butterlettuce
Tell your parents i said thank you for making you exist.
jnpnj
Lovely. I wonder how many people did similar things in their own django instances because the lack of embedded monitor is often a source of friction.
giancarlostoro
Django Admin definitely needs extensions like this. I hope someday they make it a stronger more capable Admin UI. Their own docs if I remember correctly tell you to build your own UI if you're hitting limits with the admin UI itself, which is fine, but there's so much OOTB that works nicely for the admin UI.

I like the spirit of this, and could see Django heavy shops wanting to add bits and pieces that display tooling / services they care about in Django admin.

blorenz
I love the sentiment and ambition in this! The Django admin is a core reason why I still choose Django over other solutions. I tell my team that the Django admin CRUD is our backstop when we encounter issues in our frontend UI. Thank you for tooling it out more!
ashwindharne
Looks great -- always wished the admin panel came with more configurable bells and whistles. I've been exploring Quarkus recently (https://quarkus.io/), and it has a Dev UI with a similar extensible "panels" pattern. It's a bit different than Django since it's not for running in prod, but nonetheless it's pretty helpful.

sort of a tangent, but quarkus also has a concept of "dev services" that are monitorable via the dev UI. It uses Testcontainers to start and autowire runtime deps (postgres, redis, keycloak, etc.). Pretty pleasant experience to get the whole stack spun up and observable alongside the dev server.

greenie_beans
love this!! thanks for sharing. this might help me a lot.
nehalem
I like this a lot. What I would love to see is a panel to run management commands and see their output. Would be great in services like Google Cloud Run where you cannot access a shell anymore like you could on Heroku.
josecapurro
This is fantastic! Keep on the good work! I am looking at this with great interest.

I believe keeping the tooling separate and enabling them on demand totally makes sense.

zackify
This is great, just installed this on our huge django app because I sent to another dev and claude put the pr up immediately. then i followed up and had claude add our 50 (ok not quite that many) redis instanced to it lol. So fast so easy, can't wait to see what is next
rtpg
Neat!

The Django admin is really great. I do wish there could be a bit more extensibility hook points to hook into existing stuff, but I know a loooot of projects that hack stuff into the admin despite that (I think in particular it's a bit futzy to have things like confirmation screens on custom actions).

I think the real power of Django comes from not only having the batteries included, but almost always having the right kind of extension points in terms of methods (or template overrides) that really give you ways to quickly insert the right kinds of customization for your project. The admin existing and working so well for so long is proof of that IMO