django-contact-form 1.8¶

django-contact-form provides customizable contact-form functionality for Django-powered Web sites.

Basic functionality (collecting a name, email address and message) can be achieved out of the box by setting up a few templates and adding one line to your site’s root URLconf:

path('contact/', include('contact_form.urls')),

For notes on getting started quickly, and on how to customize django-contact-form’s behavior, read through the full documentation below.

Installation guide¶

The 1.8 release of django-contact-form supports Django 2.2 and 3.0 on the following Python versions:

Django 2.2 supports Python 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8.
Django 3.0 supports Python 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8.

Normal installation¶

The preferred method of installing django-contact-form is via pip, the standard Python package-installation tool. If you don’t have pip, instructions are available for how to obtain and install it. If you’re using a supported version of Python, pip should have come bundled with your installation of Python.

Once you have pip, type:

pip install django-contact-form

If you plan to use the included spam-filtering contact form class, AkismetContactForm, you will also need the Python akismet module. You can manually install it via pip install akismet, or tell django-contact-form to install it for you, by running:

pip install django-contact-form[akismet]

If you don’t have a copy of a compatible version of Django, installing django-contact-form will also automatically install one for you.

Installing from a source checkout¶

If you want to work on django-contact-form, you can obtain a source checkout.

The development repository for django-contact-form is at <https://github.com/ubernostrum/django-contact-form>. If you have git installed, you can obtain a copy of the repository by typing:

git clone https://github.com/ubernostrum/django-contact-form.git

From there, you can use git commands to check out the specific revision you want, and perform an “editable” install (allowing you to change code as you work on it) by typing:

pip install -e .

Next steps¶

To get up and running quickly, check out the quick start guide. For full documentation, see the documentation index.

Quick start guide¶

First you’ll need to have Django and django-contact-form installed; for details on that, see the installation guide.

Once that’s done, you can start setting up django-contact-form. First, add ‘contact_form’ to your INSTALLED_APPS setting. Then, you can begin configuring.

URL configuration¶

The quickest way to set up the views in django-contact-form is to use the provided URLconf, found at contact_form.urls. You can include it wherever you like in your site’s URL configuration; for example, to have it live at the URL /contact/:

from django.urls import include, path


urlpatterns = [
    # ... other URL patterns for your site ...
    path('contact/', include('contact_form.urls')),
]

If you’ll be using a custom form class, you’ll need to manually set up your URLs so you can tell django-contact-form about your form class. For example:

from django.urls import include, path
from django.views.generic import TemplateView

from contact_form.views import ContactFormView

from yourapp.forms import YourCustomFormClass


urlpatterns = [
    # ... other URL patterns for your site ...
    path('contact/',
        ContactFormView.as_view(
            form_class=YourCustomFormClass
        ),
        name='contact_form'),
    path('contact/sent/',
        TemplateView.as_view(
            template_name='contact_form/contact_form_sent.html'
        ),
        name='contact_form_sent'),
]

Important

Where to put custom forms and views

When writing a custom form class (or custom ContactFormView subclass), don’t put your custom code inside django-contact-form. Instead, put your custom code in the appropriate place (a forms.py or views.py file) in an application you’ve written.

Required templates¶

The two views above will need several templates to be created.

contact_form/contact_form.html¶

This is used to display the contact form. It has a RequestContext (so any context processors will be applied), and also provides the form instance as the context variable form.

contact_form/contact_form_sent.html¶

This is used after a successful form submission, to let the user know their message has been sent. It has a RequestContext, but provides no additional context variables of its own.

contact_form/contact_form.txt¶

Used to render the subject of the email. Will receive a RequestContext with the following additional variables:

body: The message the user typed.
email: The email address the user supplied.
name: The name the user supplied.
site: The current site. Either a Site or RequestSite instance, depending on whether Django’s sites framework is installed).

contact_form/contact_form_subject.txt¶

Used to render the subject of the email. Will receive a RequestContext with the following additional variables:

body: The message the user typed.
email: The email address the user supplied.
name: The name the user supplied.
site: The current site. Either a Site or RequestSite instance, depending on whether Django’s sites framework is installed).

Warning

Subject must be a single line

In order to prevent header injection attacks, the subject must be only a single line of text, and Django’s email framework will reject any attempt to send an email with a multi-line subject. So it’s a good idea to ensure your contact_form_subject.txt template only produces a single line of output when rendered; as a precaution, however, django-contact-form will, by default, condense the output of this template to a single line.

Using a spam-filtering contact form¶

Spam filtering is a common desire for contact forms, due to the large amount of spam they can attract. There is a spam-filtering contact form class included in django-contact-form: AkismetContactForm, which uses the Wordpress Akismet spam-detection service.

To use this form, you will need to do the following things:

Install the Python akismet module to allow django-contact-form to communicate with the Akismet service. You can do this via pip install akismet, or as you install django-contact-form via pip install django-contact-form[akismet].
Obtain an Akismet API key from <https://akismet.com/>, and associate it with the URL of your site.
Supply the API key and URL for django-contact-form to use. You can either place them in the Django settings AKISMET_API_KEY and AKISMET_BLOG_URL, or in the environment variables PYTHON_AKISMET_API_KEY and PYTHON_AKISMET_BLOG_URL.

Then you can replace the suggested URLconf above with the following:

from django.urls import include, path


urlpatterns = [
    # ... other URL patterns for your site ...
    path('contact/', include('contact_form.akismet_urls')),
]

Contact form classes¶

There are two contact-form classes included in django-contact-form; one provides all the infrastructure for a contact form, and will usually be the base class for subclasses which want to extend or modify functionality. The other is a subclass which adds spam filtering to the contact form.

The ContactForm class¶

class contact_form.forms.ContactForm¶

The base contact form class from which all contact form classes should inherit.

If you don’t need any customization, you can use this form to provide basic contact-form functionality; it will collect name, email address and message.

The ContactFormView included in this application knows how to work with this form and can handle many types of subclasses as well (see below for a discussion of the important points), so in many cases it will be all that you need. If you’d like to use this form or a subclass of it from one of your own views, here’s how:

When you instantiate the form, pass the current HttpRequest object as the keyword argument request; this is used internally by the base implementation, and also made available so that subclasses can add functionality which relies on inspecting the request (such as spam filtering).
To send the message, call the form’s save() method, which accepts the keyword argument fail_silently and defaults it to False. This argument is passed directly to Django’s send_mail() function, and allows you to suppress or raise exceptions as needed for debugging. The save() method has no return value.

Other than that, treat it like any other form; validity checks and validated data are handled normally, through the is_valid() method and the cleaned_data dictionary.

Under the hood, this form uses a somewhat abstracted interface in order to make it easier to subclass and add functionality.

The following attributes play a role in determining behavior, and any of them can be implemented as an attribute or as a method (for example, if you wish to have from_email be dynamic, you can implement a method named from_email() instead of setting the attribute from_email).

from_email¶: The email address (str) to use in the From: header of the message. By default, this is the value of the Django setting DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL.

recipient_list¶: A list of recipients for the message. By default, this is the email addresses specified in the setting MANAGERS.

subject_template_name¶: A str, the name of the template to use when rendering the subject line of the message. By default, this is contact_form/contact_form_subject.txt.

template_name¶: A str, the name of the template to use when rendering the body of the message. By default, this is contact_form/contact_form.txt.

And two methods are involved in producing the contents of the message to send:

message()¶

Returns the body of the message to send. By default, this is accomplished by rendering the template name specified in template_name.

Return type:	str

subject()¶

Returns the subject line of the message to send. By default, this is accomplished by rendering the template name specified in subject_template_name.

Return type:	str

Warning

Subject must be a single line

The subject of an email is sent in a header (named Subject:). Because email uses newlines as a separator between headers, newlines in the subject can cause it to be interpreted as multiple headers; this is the header injection attack. To prevent this, subject() will always force the subject to a single line of text, stripping all newline characters. If you override subject(), be sure to either do this manually, or use super() to call the parent implementation.

Finally, the message itself is generated by the following two methods:

get_message_dict()¶

This method loops through from_email, recipient_list, message() and subject(), collecting those parts into a dictionary with keys corresponding to the arguments to Django’s send_mail function, then returns the dictionary. Overriding this allows essentially unlimited customization of how the message is generated. Note that for compatibility, implementations which override this should support callables for the values of from_email and recipient_list.

Return type:	dict

get_context()¶

For methods which render portions of the message using templates (by default, message() and subject()), generates the context used by those templates. The default context will be a RequestContext (using the current HTTP request, so user information is available), plus the contents of the form’s cleaned_data dictionary, and one additional variable:

site: If django.contrib.sites is installed, the currently-active Site object. Otherwise, a RequestSite object generated from the request.

Return type:	dict

Meanwhile, the following attributes/methods generally should not be overridden; doing so may interfere with functionality, may not accomplish what you want, and generally any desired customization can be accomplished in a more straightforward way through overriding one of the attributes/methods listed above.

request¶: The HttpRequest object representing the current request. This is set automatically in __init__(), and is used both to generate a RequestContext for the templates and to allow subclasses to engage in request-specific behavior.

save()¶: If the form has data and is valid, will send the email, by calling get_message_dict() and passing the result to Django’s send_mail() function.

Note that subclasses which override __init__ or save() need to accept *args and **kwargs, and pass them via super(), in order to preserve behavior (each of those methods accepts at least one additional argument, and this application expects and requires them to do so).

The Akismet (spam-filtering) contact form class¶

class contact_form.forms.AkismetContactForm¶

A subclass of ContactForm which adds spam filtering, via the Wordpress Akismet spam-detection service.

Use of this class requires you to provide configuration for the Akismet web service; you’ll need to obtain an Akismet API key, and you’ll need to associate it with the site you’ll use the contact form on. You can do this at <https://akismet.com/>. Once you have, you can configure in either of two ways:

Put your Akismet API key in the Django setting AKISMET_API_KEY, and the URL it’s associated with in the setting AKISMET_BLOG_URL, or
Put your Akismet API key in the environment variable PYTHON_AKISMET_API_KEY, and the URL it’s associated with in the environment variable PYTHON_AKISMET_BLOG_URL.

You will also need the Python Akismet module to communicate with the Akismet web service. You can install it by running pip install akismet, or django-contact-form can install it automatically for you if you run pip install django-contact-form[akismet].

Once you have an Akismet API key and URL configured, and the akismet module installed, you can drop in AkismetContactForm anywhere you would have used ContactForm. A URLconf is provided in django-contact-form, at contact_form.akismet_urls, which will correctly configure AkismetContactForm for you.

Built-in views¶

class contact_form.views.ContactFormView¶

The base view class from which most custom contact-form views should inherit. If you don’t need any custom functionality, and are content with the default ContactForm class, you can also use it as-is (and the provided URLConf, contact_form.urls, does exactly this).

This is a subclass of Django’s FormView, so refer to the Django documentation for a list of attributes/methods which can be overridden to customize behavior.

One non-standard attribute is defined here:

recipient_list¶: The list of email addresses to send mail to. If not specified, defaults to the recipient_list of the form.

Additionally, the following standard (from FormView) methods and attributes are commonly useful to override (all attributes below can also be passed to as_view() in the URLconf, permitting customization without the need to write a full custom subclass of ContactFormView):

form_class¶: The form class to use. By default, will be ContactForm. This can also be overridden as a method named form_class(); this permits, for example, per-request customization (by inspecting attributes of self.request).

template_name¶: A str, the template to use when rendering the form. By default, will be contact_form/contact_form.html.

get_success_url()¶

The URL to redirect to after successful form submission. Can be a hard-coded string, the string resulting from calling Django’s reverse() helper, or the lazy object produced by Django’s reverse_lazy() helper. Default value is the result of calling reverse_lazy() with the URL name ‘contact_form_sent’.

Return type:	str

get_form_kwargs()¶

Returns additional keyword arguments (as a dictionary) to pass to the form class on initialization.

By default, this will return a dictionary containing the current HttpRequest (as the key request) and, if recipient_list was defined, its value (as the key recipient_list).

Warning

If you override get_form_kwargs(), you must ensure that, at the very least, the keyword argument request is still provided, or ContactForm initialization will raise TypeError. The easiest approach is to use super() to call the base implementation in ContactFormView, and modify the dictionary it returns.

Return type:	dict

Frequently asked questions¶

The following notes answer some common questions, and may be useful to you when installing, configuring or using django-contact-form.

What versions of Django and Python are supported?¶

As of django-contact-for,m 1.8, Django 2.2 and 3.0 are supported, on 3.5 (Django 2.2 only) 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8.

What license is django-contact-form under?¶

django-contact-form is offered under a three-clause BSD-style license; this is an OSI-approved open-source license, and allows you a large degree of freedom in modifying and redistributing the code. For the full terms, see the file LICENSE which came with your copy of django-contact-form; if you did not receive a copy of this file, you can view it online at <https://github.com/ubernostrum/django-contact-form/blob/master/LICENSE>.

Why aren’t there any default templates I can use?¶

Usable default templates, for an application designed to be widely reused, are essentially impossible to produce; variations in site design, block structure, etc. cannot be reliably accounted for. As such, django-contact-form provides bare-bones (i.e., containing no HTML structure whatsoever) templates in its source distribution to enable running tests, and otherwise just provides good documentation of all required templates and the context made available to them.

Why am I getting a bunch of BadHeaderError exceptions?¶

Most likely, you have an error in your ContactForm subclass. Specifically, one or more of from_email, recipient_list or subject() are returning values which contain newlines.

As a security precaution against email header injection attacks (which allow spammers and other malicious users to manipulate email and potentially cause automated systems to send mail to unintended recipients), Django’s email-sending framework does not permit newlines in message headers. BadHeaderError is the exception Django raises when a newline is detected in a header. By default, contact_form.forms.ContactForm.subject() will forcibly condense the subject to a single line.

Note that this only applies to the headers of an email message; the message body can (and usually does) contain newlines.

I found a bug or want to make an improvement!¶

The canonical development repository for django-contact-form is online at <https://github.com/ubernostrum/django-contact-form>. Issues and pull requests can both be filed there.

If you’d like to contribute to django-contact-form, that’s great! Just please remember that pull requests should include tests and documentation for any changes made, and that following PEP 8 is mandatory. Pull requests without documentation won’t be merged, and PEP 8 style violations or test coverage below 100% are both configured to break the build.

I’m getting errors about “akismet” when trying to run tests?¶

The full test suite of django-contact-form exercises all of its functionality, including the spam-filtering AkismetContactForm. That class uses the Wordpress Akismet spam-detection service to perform spam filtering, and so requires the Python akismet module to communicate with the Akismet service, and some additional configuration (in the form of a valid Akismet API key and associated URL).

By default, the tests for AkismetContactForm will be skipped unless the required configuration (in the form of either a pair of Django settings, or a pair of environment variables) is detected. However, if you have supplied Akismet configuration but do not have the Python akismet module, you will see test errors from attempts to import akismet. You can resolve this by running:

pip install akismet

or (if you do not intend to use AkismetContactForm) by no longer configuring the Django settings/environment variables used by Akismet.

Additionally, if the AkismetContactForm tests are skipped, the default code-coverage report will fail due to the relevant code not being exercised during the test run.