How to Edit Django Settings

Modules (a.k.a Django Apps)

The OpenWISP server application is composed of a number of modules called Django apps, Django is the underlying web framework on top of which OpenWISP is built.

Some of the Django apps used by OpenWISP are developed and maintained by OpenWISP, other apps are developed and maintained by either Django or third party organizations, but most of these apps are configurable and customizable in different shapes or forms.

The most common way to modify the behavior of a Django app is by editing the settings.py file, a file which holds all the global configuration of the application.

The OpenWISP django modules are highly configurable and over time you may need to edit their settings, these settings are documented in the respective README documentation files of each module, for a list of all the available modules please see Architecture, Modules, Technologies.

Editing settings with the ansible role

The official ansible OpenWISP role provides many configuration variables which offer a convenient way to edit the most widely used settings of OpenWISP.

However, not all the possible settings have a corresponding variable because doing so would be very costly to maintain and make the code more complicated, for that reason the role provides a way to add any python instruction to define and manipulate settings via the openwisp2_extra_django_settings_instructions variable, e.g.:

# in the playbook variables add:
openwisp2_extra_django_settings_instructions:
  - |
    OPENWISP_NETWORK_TOPOLOGY_NODE_EXPIRATION = 14

    OPENWISP_MONITORING_METRICS = {
        'ping': {
            'alert_settings': {'tolerance': 60}
        },
        'config_applied': {
            'alert_settings': {'tolerance': 60}
        },
        'disk': {
            'alert_settings': {'tolerance': 60}
        },
        'memory': {
            'alert_settings': {'tolerance': 60}
        },
        'cpu': {
            'alert_settings': {
                'threshold': 95,
                'tolerance': 60
            }
        },
    }

This allows for great flexibility in configuring and extending OpenWISP, because additional custom modules can be added and configured too.

Editing settings with docker-openwisp

Similarly to the ansible role, the dockerized version of OpenWISP provides mainly two ways of changing settings:

1. The most widely used setting have a dedicated environment variable.

2. For more advanced use cases, it's possible to provide an entirely custom django settings file.