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I've shipped a few admin panels for internal tools using this pattern and the real win is onboarding time. New teammates can find and run scripts in 30 seconds versus asking where the hell the Slack integration cron job lives. The search functionality actually makes old tools discoverable again.
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.
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.
The Django admin is really great. I do wish there could be a bit more extensibility hook points to hook into existing stuff, but I know a loooot of projects that hack stuff into the admin despite that (I think in particular it's a bit futzy to have things like confirmation screens on custom actions).
I think the real power of Django comes from not only having the batteries included, but almost always having the right kind of extension points in terms of methods (or template overrides) that really give you ways to quickly insert the right kinds of customization for your project. The admin existing and working so well for so long is proof of that IMO
If you work with Django long enough, and at significant scale, you live long enough to b̶e̶c̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶v̶i̶l̶l̶a̶i̶n̶ make hacky extensions to the admin.
I am hoping this work makes it easier for people to start extending the admin in a normalized way.
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.
I disagree — entrypoints are overengineered for most use cases. A simple registry pattern or even explicit imports would be clearer and easier to debug. The "magic" of auto-discovery adds complexity that small teams end up regretting when things break.
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!
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
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
I saw this exact pattern play out with Rails admin gems around 2010. Everyone reinvented the wheel until a few good ones emerged. The framework tax is worth it once you're past the prototype stage.
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.
Has anyone actually tried using this in production with non-technical stakeholders? The Django admin is already confusing enough for product managers who just want to update a field. Adding more layers seems like it could backfire unless the UI is very carefully designed.
I mean for one thing your garden variety LLM had been substantially trained to handle Django. That is less context for it to bootstrap every time you summon it.
Just like rolling your shitty homebrew framework is a bad idea because only you understand it, the same is probably true with LLMs. Sure they’ll scan the bejesus out of your codebase every time they need to make a change and probably figure it out eventually… but that is just a poor use of limited context. With something mainstream, the LLM already has a lot about the universe in its training. Not to mention an ecosystem of plugins, skills, mcp servers, wizbango-hashers, and claberdashers. All there for the LLM to use instead of wasting tons of time, tokens and money perpetually relearning your oddball, one-off, rat infested homebrew framework.
I think that explains some of the value for this project a bit better