INSTALLED_APPS: can they be optional?

Using Django
1

What I’d like to do: enable django-webhook only if the user has installed the package (via extras or whatever)

It looks like specifying an application that doesn’t exist / isn’t installed causes an ImportError. Can this be caught? Can I do things like enable and disable menus in the frontend based on what’s installed?

2

Are you creating a reusable django package or an end project to be hosted somewhere?

3

I’m tinkering with GitHub - sissbruecker/linkding: Self-hosted bookmark manager that is designed be to be minimal, fast, and easy to set up using Docker.

4

Ok, the installed apps setting is global across users of the project. If you were to remove it for a single user then it would affect every user.

5

Yeah I get that, I’m thinking about the case where it’s hosted by a single user for a single user.

If that user doesn’t pip install the package, they don’t get that menu item - but this kind of dynamic loading doesn’t seem possible.

6

It probably is possible given settings.py is just a python file and INSTALLED_APPS is just a list. There is nothing special about either of them.

So you could do:

INSTALLED_APPS  = [...]
try:
  import django_webhook
  INSTALLED_APPS += ['django_webhook']
except ImportError
  pass

or similar.

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