1. Install with pip

pip install django-cbv-inspect

2. Add cbv_inspect to your list of INSTALLED_APPS in your Django settings module

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    "cbv_inspect",
    ...
]

3. Add the middleware to your list of MIDDLEWARE classes in your Django settings module

MIDDLEWARE = [
    ...
    "cbv_inspect.middleware.DjCbvInspectMiddleware",
    ...
]

4. Make sure your TEMPLATES settings uses the DjangoTemplates backend with APP_DIRS set to True

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        "BACKEND": "django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates",
        "APP_DIRS": True,
        ...
    }
]

When all installation steps are done, any html response rendered by a class-based view should display the django-cbv-inspect toolbar on the page.

By default, all class-based views will be processed by the middleware. If you wish to exclude views, there are two options:

from cbv_inspect.mixins import DjCbvExcludeMixin


class MyCoolView(DjCbvExcludeMixin, View):
    pass

from django.utils.decorators import method_decorator
from cbv_inspect.decorators import djcbv_exclude


@method_decorator(djcbv_exclude, name="dispatch")
class MyCoolView(View):
    pass

You can run the example project locally to test things out!

Clone the project and from the root of the repo, run the following Make command to setup the example project:

make run-example

To run unittests with coverage, run

make coverage

The django-cbv-inspect toolbar has three main sections:

1. View information
2. CBV method call chain
3. MRO classes

This section shows high level information about the class-based view, request, and url.

This is the main section that shows all methods that were excuted for the current class-based view:

It shows:

• method name and signature
• Classy Class-Based Views (ccbv.co.uk) links
• method arguments and return value
• all resolved super() calls defined in the method
• module location

This section lists all MRO classes of the current class-based view class.

This can come in handy especially with the prior section when mapping the execution of a class-based view.

Django class-based views are hard to grasp especially when you're new to Django.

Fortunately for us, tools like django-debug-toolbar and ccbv.co.uk are super helpful in providing extra context for debugging.

My goal for this app was to take what goes on under the hood in a class-based view and display it in an easy to use interface, just like what django-debug-toolbar does.

Hopefully this can help debug your class-based views!

Happy coding! ✨