…fumbleLog

Django error emails on 500 errors are pretty useless if you’re the acting
customer support for the day. There’s absolutely not much besides a
session ID, to identify which user actually got that exception. Obviously
for a startup, that’s essential to reacho out to little customers we do
have, if for nothing else than to apologize. Anyways here’s a simple
little snippet that can help you figure out a user from a session id.
Note, that the user might not be logged in, in that case there’s not much
you can do.

def get_user_from_sessionid(sessionid):
       """
       ``sessionid`` - is the identifier for the users session. 
       You can also find it in the Http500 error messages on screen
       or via email.

       >>> get_user_from_sessionid('fd3479022d77794897e5b23f4d461bbf')
       """
       from django.contrib.sessions.models import Session
       from django.contrib.auth.models import User


       session = Session.objects.get(session_key=sessionid)
       uid = session.get_decoded().get('_auth_user_id')
       user = User.objects.get(pk=uid)

       return user.id, user.username, user.email

Links

• http://code.google.com/p/django-command-extensions/ – There is already a command in django-extensions, called ‘print_user_for_session’ that does
  the same.
• http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/1276/ – for a backend agnostic method.
• http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2008/12/04/get-user-from-session-key-in-django/ – is practically the same snippet as above.

There’s also a way to add the username to the error emails themselves, by overriding a process_exception on a middleware. You can read about it here

.