How to re-route the Django admin homepage

It’s very easy to change the default homepage of the Django admin to show any other page you have already defined. For this example I’ll use the now famous “poll” application described in the Django documentation.

Assuming you already have setup the admin interface for the Poll model, your polls/admin.py file should look something like this:

from mysite.polls.models import Poll
from django.contrib import admin
 
admin.site.register(Poll)

and your urls.py file might be something like this:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
from django.contrib import admin
 
admin.autodiscover()
 
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
)

Now, what if we wanted to show the list of Polls after the user logs in, instead of the default homepage showing the list of installed applications? This is how it’s done:

from mysite.polls.models import Poll
from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
from django.contrib import admin
 
admin.autodiscover()
 
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^admin/$', admin.site.admin_view(admin.site._registry[Poll].changelist_view)),
    (r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
)

Notice we’re adding an extra pattern to the urls.py file where we define the changelist_view as the view for the homepage. It is important to call admin.site.admin_view method so all the redirection rules work right.

That’s it!