Show HN: Django Control Room – All Your Tools Inside the Django Admin

[OP] yassi_dev | 7 hours ago

I've built an official website for this project here: https://djangocontrolroom.com/

I think that explains some of the value for this project a bit better

malux85 | 7 hours ago

Great project, Django admin totally needs some love! You rock!

[OP] yassi_dev | 7 hours ago

Thank you. I wholeheartedly agree; The Django admin a great surface to stand up tooling

ramon156 | 6 hours ago

A vibe-coded website built on a vibe-coded README, can't get any better than this

[OP] yassi_dev | 6 hours ago

Fair.

README and site were definitely optimized for speed over perfection. The panels themselves got a bit more attention.

Curious what you’d want to see improved on the docs/site side.

parham | 6 hours ago

It’s the initial starting point, calm down.

I like the idea it can help for initial inspection and smell detection

seyz | 6 hours ago

toxic.

Eldt | 5 hours ago

Not all negativity is toxic. My sense of hunger is unpleasant but it keeps me healthy.

cruffle_duffle | 5 hours ago

I mean docs are largely written for an LLM-in-a-harness. That’s how it goes! If the LLM bootstraps with the right understanding of the universe and knows how to quickly build specific context flavors… life is good.

dec0dedab0de | 6 hours ago

i like it, but I think i would rather have a proxy, or atleast an auth redirect to those different tools.

I used to have flower at myapp.com/flower using an auth redirect in nginx to a simple view in django that made sure it was an admin user. I think if you can make that setup easier to leverage existing tools that would be nicer than rebuilding everything.

[OP] yassi_dev | 6 hours ago

Totally understand - I am a long time flower user for example, and I am familiar with having to harden that installation a bit.

What I'm aiming for here is slightly different - keeping everything inside Django so there are no extra services to run or configure or proxy. As long as you surface the admin somewhere, then that is the place to find your tooling (including celery monitoring)

There will always be room for both approaches. A lightweight proxy/redirect could be something to explore in the future.

dec0dedab0de | 3 hours ago

That definitely makes sense. But as it stands it's more of a multi-tool than a toolbox. I'm definitely going to check it out though.

drchaim | 5 hours ago

Good idea. If you add a kind of skill/prompt you’ll get a lot of other components from the community ;)

[OP] yassi_dev | 2 hours ago

Thats an interesting idea. One of my next steps is to create a tutorial on how to make your own panel. I'll think on this.

dzonga | 5 hours ago

this is pretty dope

[OP] yassi_dev | 5 hours ago

Thanks. I hope you find it useful

izzie1234 | 5 hours ago

I love this idea. I see the AI era having 2 competing views when building something new:

1. Build X with pure <language of choice>. Why? LLMs will have less context needed, and onboarding engineers would be easier since there’ll be less overhead and opinionated frameworks knowledge required

2. Build X using well establish frameworks. Painful in the beginning since you’ll not only need language knowledge, but framework knowledge. The upshot, is scaling and maintainability

I love that this ecosystem will heavily pressure teams to consider (2) more and more — solving the very real “AI slop” problem

[OP] yassi_dev | 5 hours ago

Thats an interesting way to frame it.

In my view. Building things with AI creates the need for common patterns and guardrails (i.e. frameworks) Then as these new apps become productionalized - tooling that fits your framework starts to become more important.

In that sense, AI increases the need for good patterns around observability. This project aims to make this a little easier to do for Django right from inside the framework as opposed to an external service.

simonw | 4 hours ago

I like the way each panel is its own separate package on PyPI and the system picks them up via setuptools entry points. It's a neat implementation of a plugin pattern.

[OP] yassi_dev | 4 hours ago

Thanks. Part of the reason this exists is simply wanting to toy around with the entrypoints system

butterlettuce | 4 hours ago

Tell your parents i said thank you for making you exist.

[OP] yassi_dev | 2 hours ago

They said your welcome

jnpnj | 3 hours ago

Lovely. I wonder how many people did similar things in their own django instances because the lack of embedded monitor is often a source of friction.

[OP] yassi_dev | 3 hours ago

I think any large enough django project has toyed around with extending the admin in some way. Hopefully this project can help establish a standard to make this sort of thing easier.

giancarlostoro | 3 hours ago

Django Admin definitely needs extensions like this. I hope someday they make it a stronger more capable Admin UI. Their own docs if I remember correctly tell you to build your own UI if you're hitting limits with the admin UI itself, which is fine, but there's so much OOTB that works nicely for the admin UI.

I like the spirit of this, and could see Django heavy shops wanting to add bits and pieces that display tooling / services they care about in Django admin.

[OP] yassi_dev | 3 hours ago

Thank you.

I think its good advice to avoid the admin for customer facing use cases. But for internal facing tools It seems pretty wasteful to not use the built in admin - it has all the bells as whistles to build upon (auth, permissions, etc.)

blorenz | 3 hours ago

I love the sentiment and ambition in this! The Django admin is a core reason why I still choose Django over other solutions. I tell my team that the Django admin CRUD is our backstop when we encounter issues in our frontend UI. Thank you for tooling it out more!

[OP] yassi_dev | 3 hours ago

I'm glad you feel that way. The django admin has saved my day many times.

ashwindharne | 3 hours ago

Looks great -- always wished the admin panel came with more configurable bells and whistles. I've been exploring Quarkus recently (https://quarkus.io/), and it has a Dev UI with a similar extensible "panels" pattern. It's a bit different than Django since it's not for running in prod, but nonetheless it's pretty helpful.

sort of a tangent, but quarkus also has a concept of "dev services" that are monitorable via the dev UI. It uses Testcontainers to start and autowire runtime deps (postgres, redis, keycloak, etc.). Pretty pleasant experience to get the whole stack spun up and observable alongside the dev server.

johsole | 2 hours ago

Nice work.

HFerrahoglu | 2 hours ago

looks good.

rick1290 | 2 hours ago

love it

greenie_beans | 2 hours ago

love this!! thanks for sharing. this might help me a lot.

nehalem | 2 hours ago

I like this a lot. What I would love to see is a panel to run management commands and see their output. Would be great in services like Google Cloud Run where you cannot access a shell anymore like you could on Heroku.

[OP] yassi_dev | 2 hours ago

Thats the spirit. I built this to unlock the django application from platforms in such a way

josecapurro | 34 minutes ago

This is fantastic! Keep on the good work! I am looking at this with great interest.

I believe keeping the tooling separate and enabling them on demand totally makes sense.

zackify | 26 minutes ago

This is great, just installed this on our huge django app because I sent to another dev and claude put the pr up immediately. then i followed up and had claude add our 50 (ok not quite that many) redis instanced to it lol. So fast so easy, can't wait to see what is next