The messages framework

Quite commonly in web applications, you need to display a one-time notification message (also known as “flash message”) to the user after processing a form or some other types of user input.

For this, Django provides full support for cookie- and session-based messaging, for both anonymous and authenticated users. The messages framework allows you to temporarily store messages in one request and retrieve them for display in a subsequent request (usually the next one). Every message is tagged with a specific level that determines its priority (e.g., info, warning, or error).

Enabling messages

Messages are implemented through a middleware class and corresponding context processor.

The default settings.py created by django-admin startproject already contains all the settings required to enable message functionality:

  • 'django.contrib.messages' is in INSTALLED_APPS.

  • MIDDLEWARE contains 'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware' and 'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware'.

    The default storage backend relies on sessions. That’s why SessionMiddleware must be enabled and appear before MessageMiddleware in MIDDLEWARE.

  • The 'context_processors' option of the DjangoTemplates backend defined in your TEMPLATES setting contains 'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages'.

If you don’t want to use messages, you can remove 'django.contrib.messages' from your INSTALLED_APPS, the MessageMiddleware line from MIDDLEWARE, and the messages context processor from TEMPLATES.

Configuring the message engine

Storage backends

The messages framework can use different backends to store temporary messages.

Django provides three built-in storage classes in django.contrib.messages:

class storage.session.SessionStorage

This class stores all messages inside of the request’s session. Therefore it requires Django’s contrib.sessions application.

class storage.cookie.CookieStorage

This class stores the message data in a cookie (signed with a secret hash to prevent manipulation) to persist notifications across requests. Old messages are dropped if the cookie data size would exceed 2048 bytes.

class storage.fallback.FallbackStorage

This class first uses CookieStorage, and falls back to using SessionStorage for the messages that could not fit in a single cookie. It also requires Django’s contrib.sessions application.

This behavior avoids writing to the session whenever possible. It should provide the best performance in the general case.

FallbackStorage is the default storage class. If it isn’t suitable to your needs, you can select another storage class by setting MESSAGE_STORAGE to its full import path, for example:

MESSAGE_STORAGE = "django.contrib.messages.storage.cookie.CookieStorage"
class storage.base.BaseStorage

To write your own storage class, subclass the BaseStorage class in django.contrib.messages.storage.base and implement the _get and _store methods.

Message levels

The messages framework is based on a configurable level architecture similar to that of the Python logging module. Message levels allow you to group messages by type so they can be filtered or displayed differently in views and templates.

The built-in levels, which can be imported from django.contrib.messages directly, are:

Constant Purpose
DEBUG Development-related messages that will be ignored (or removed) in a production deployment
INFO Informational messages for the user
SUCCESS An action was successful, e.g. “Your profile was updated successfully”
WARNING A failure did not occur but may be imminent
ERROR An action was not successful or some other failure occurred

The MESSAGE_LEVEL setting can be used to change the minimum recorded level (or it can be changed per request). Attempts to add messages of a level less than this will be ignored.

Message tags

Message tags are a string representation of the message level plus any extra tags that were added directly in the view (see Adding extra message tags below for more details). Tags are stored in a string and are separated by spaces. Typically, message tags are used as CSS classes to customize message style based on message type. By default, each level has a single tag that’s a lowercase version of its own constant:

Level Constant Tag
DEBUG debug
INFO info
SUCCESS success
WARNING warning
ERROR error

To change the default tags for a message level (either built-in or custom), set the MESSAGE_TAGS setting to a dictionary containing the levels you wish to change. As this extends the default tags, you only need to provide tags for the levels you wish to override:

from django.contrib.messages import constants as messages

MESSAGE_TAGS = {
    messages.INFO: "",
    50: "critical",
}

Using messages in views and templates

add_message(request, level, message, extra_tags='', fail_silently=False)

Adding a message

To add a message, call:

from django.contrib import messages

messages.add_message(request, messages.INFO, "Hello world.")

Some shortcut methods provide a standard way to add messages with commonly used tags (which are usually represented as HTML classes for the message):

messages.debug(request, "%s SQL statements were executed." % count)
messages.info(request, "Three credits remain in your account.")
messages.success(request, "Profile details updated.")
messages.warning(request, "Your account expires in three days.")
messages.error(request, "Document deleted.")

Displaying messages

get_messages(request)

In your template, use something like:

{% if messages %}
<ul class="messages">
    {% for message in messages %}
    <li{% if message.tags %} class="{{ message.tags }}"{% endif %}>{{ message }}</li>
    {% endfor %}
</ul>
{% endif %}

If you’re using the context processor, your template should be rendered with a RequestContext. Otherwise, ensure messages is available to the template context.

Even if you know there is only one message, you should still iterate over the messages sequence, because otherwise the message storage will not be cleared for the next request.

The context processor also provides a DEFAULT_MESSAGE_LEVELS variable which is a mapping of the message level names to their numeric value:

{% if messages %}
<ul class="messages">
    {% for message in messages %}
    <li{% if message.tags %} class="{{ message.tags }}"{% endif %}>
        {% if message.level == DEFAULT_MESSAGE_LEVELS.ERROR %}Important: {% endif %}
        {{ message }}
    </li>
    {% endfor %}
</ul>
{% endif %}

Outside of templates, you can use get_messages():

from django.contrib.messages import get_messages

storage = get_messages(request)
for message in storage:
    do_something_with_the_message(message)

For instance, you can fetch all the messages to return them in a JSONResponseMixin instead of a TemplateResponseMixin.

get_messages() will return an instance of the configured storage backend.

The Message class

class Message

When you loop over the list of messages in a template, what you get are instances of the Message class. They have only a few attributes:

  • message: The actual text of the message.
  • level: An integer describing the type of the message (see the message levels section above).
  • tags: A string combining all the message’s tags (extra_tags and level_tag) separated by spaces.
  • extra_tags: A string containing custom tags for this message, separated by spaces. It’s empty by default.
  • level_tag: The string representation of the level. By default, it’s the lowercase version of the name of the associated constant, but this can be changed if you need by using the MESSAGE_TAGS setting.

Creating custom message levels

Messages levels are nothing more than integers, so you can define your own level constants and use them to create more customized user feedback, e.g.:

CRITICAL = 50


def my_view(request):
    messages.add_message(request, CRITICAL, "A serious error occurred.")

When creating custom message levels you should be careful to avoid overloading existing levels. The values for the built-in levels are:

Level Constant Value
DEBUG 10
INFO 20
SUCCESS 25
WARNING 30
ERROR 40

If you need to identify the custom levels in your HTML or CSS, you need to provide a mapping via the MESSAGE_TAGS setting.

Note

If you are creating a reusable application, it is recommended to use only the built-in message levels and not rely on any custom levels.

Changing the minimum recorded level per-request

The minimum recorded level can be set per request via the set_level method:

from django.contrib import messages

# Change the messages level to ensure the debug message is added.
messages.set_level(request, messages.DEBUG)
messages.debug(request, "Test message...")

# In another request, record only messages with a level of WARNING and higher
messages.set_level(request, messages.WARNING)
messages.success(request, "Your profile was updated.")  # ignored
messages.warning(request, "Your account is about to expire.")  # recorded

# Set the messages level back to default.
messages.set_level(request, None)

Similarly, the current effective level can be retrieved with get_level:

from django.contrib import messages

current_level = messages.get_level(request)

For more information on how the minimum recorded level functions, see Message levels above.

Adding extra message tags

For more direct control over message tags, you can optionally provide a string containing extra tags to any of the add methods:

messages.add_message(request, messages.INFO, "Over 9000!", extra_tags="dragonball")
messages.error(request, "Email box full", extra_tags="email")

Extra tags are added before the default tag for that level and are space separated.

Failing silently when the message framework is disabled

If you’re writing a reusable app (or other piece of code) and want to include messaging functionality, but don’t want to require your users to enable it if they don’t want to, you may pass an additional keyword argument fail_silently=True to any of the add_message family of methods. For example:

messages.add_message(
    request,
    messages.SUCCESS,
    "Profile details updated.",
    fail_silently=True,
)
messages.info(request, "Hello world.", fail_silently=True)

Note

Setting fail_silently=True only hides the MessageFailure that would otherwise occur when the messages framework disabled and one attempts to use one of the add_message family of methods. It does not hide failures that may occur for other reasons.

Adding messages in class-based views

class views.SuccessMessageMixin

Adds a success message attribute to FormView based classes

get_success_message(cleaned_data)

cleaned_data is the cleaned data from the form which is used for string formatting

Example views.py:

from django.contrib.messages.views import SuccessMessageMixin
from django.views.generic.edit import CreateView
from myapp.models import Author


class AuthorCreateView(SuccessMessageMixin, CreateView):
    model = Author
    success_url = "/success/"
    success_message = "%(name)s was created successfully"

The cleaned data from the form is available for string interpolation using the %(field_name)s syntax. For ModelForms, if you need access to fields from the saved object override the get_success_message() method.

Example views.py for ModelForms:

from django.contrib.messages.views import SuccessMessageMixin
from django.views.generic.edit import CreateView
from myapp.models import ComplicatedModel


class ComplicatedCreateView(SuccessMessageMixin, CreateView):
    model = ComplicatedModel
    success_url = "/success/"
    success_message = "%(calculated_field)s was created successfully"

    def get_success_message(self, cleaned_data):
        return self.success_message % dict(
            cleaned_data,
            calculated_field=self.object.calculated_field,
        )

Expiration of messages

The messages are marked to be cleared when the storage instance is iterated (and cleared when the response is processed).

To avoid the messages being cleared, you can set the messages storage to False after iterating:

storage = messages.get_messages(request)
for message in storage:
    do_something_with(message)
storage.used = False

Behavior of parallel requests

Due to the way cookies (and hence sessions) work, the behavior of any backends that make use of cookies or sessions is undefined when the same client makes multiple requests that set or get messages in parallel. For example, if a client initiates a request that creates a message in one window (or tab) and then another that fetches any uniterated messages in another window, before the first window redirects, the message may appear in the second window instead of the first window where it may be expected.

In short, when multiple simultaneous requests from the same client are involved, messages are not guaranteed to be delivered to the same window that created them nor, in some cases, at all. Note that this is typically not a problem in most applications and will become a non-issue in HTML5, where each window/tab will have its own browsing context.

Settings

A few settings give you control over message behavior:

For backends that use cookies, the settings for the cookie are taken from the session cookie settings:

Testing

New in Django 5.0.

This module offers a tailored test assertion method, for testing messages attached to an HttpResponse.

To benefit from this assertion, add MessagesTestMixin to the class hierarchy:

from django.contrib.messages.test import MessagesTestMixin
from django.test import TestCase


class MsgTestCase(MessagesTestMixin, TestCase):
    pass

Then, inherit from the MsgTestCase in your tests.

MessagesTestMixin.assertMessages(response, expected_messages, ordered=True)

Asserts that messages added to the response matches expected_messages.

expected_messages is a list of Message objects.

By default, the comparison is ordering dependent. You can disable this by setting the ordered argument to False.

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