Django project debugging

Quite often there is a need to debug some code, to see what's going on and why there is so much time spent generating pretty simple web page.

There are tools making this task easier, django-debug-toolbar looks like must have debug swiss knife but I'd like to use a self-made solution.

I used to use logging as a way to get the information needed so here are two classes to debug code execution time and SQL queries and timings. They can be used as decorators or as context managers (see below).

To initialize these classes you will have to pass prefix as the only argument (needed to grep logging output).

Here are some abstract usage examples:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from django.shortcuts import render

from project.articles import get_articles, get_stats
from project.debug import timer, debug_sql


@debug_sql('index')
@timer('index')
def index(request):
    return render(request, 'index.html')


def articles(request):
    with timer('articles'):
        articles = get_articles()
        with debug_sql('articles'):
            stats = get_stats(articles)
    return render(request, 'articles.html', context={'articles': articles,
                                                     'stats': stats})

It's pretty easy to use the helpers, there is no need for a project-wide configuration and you can focus on the code you are debugging to avoid logging noise.