Django-hitcount library to track the number of hits

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What is Django-hitcount?

Django-hitcount is a powerful library that allows you to track the number of hits on an particular page or an object in your Django web application. By installing this library, you can simply keep track of the popularity of your content and use it to make data-driven decisions for your web application.

In this article, we’ll explain what Django hitcount is and a simple example of how to use it in a Django project

Installing Django-hitcount

To use Django hitcount, you need to install the package using pip. You can do this by running the following command in your terminal:


pip install django-hitcount

This will install django-hitcount on your project. Once the library is installed successfully the next step is to add 'hitcount' to your INSTALLED_APPS setting in your Django project’s settings.py file.

Using Django hitcount

To use Django hitcount, you need to define which objects you want to track in your web application. For example, if you want to track the number of hits on your blog posts, you need to add the HitCountMixin to your models.py file:

You can check the below example on how to add HitCountMixin to your models.py file


from hitcount.models import HitCountMixin, HitCount
from django.db import models

class BlogPost(models.Model, HitCountMixin):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    content = models.TextField()
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)
    # other fields...

    def __str__(self):
        return self.title

As you can see on the above code we’ve added the HitCountMixin to our BlogPost model, which provides the necessary fields to store and retrieve the hit count. We’ve also imported the HitCount model, which is used to retrieve the hit count for a particular object.

The next step is to that, you need to create a HitCountDetailView to handle the requests to increment the hit count. This view should inherit from the HitCountMixin and should be added to your urls.py file


from hitcount.views import HitCountDetailView
from .models import BlogPost

urlpatterns = [
    # other urls...
    path('blog/<int:pk>/', HitCountDetailView.as_view(model=BlogPost), name='blog-detail'),
]

Now we’ve added a URL pattern that maps to our HitCountDetailView. The model parameter tells Django which model to use for hit count tracking. In this case, we’ve used the BlogPost model.

Finally, you can display the hit count on your template by using the hit_count attribute of the object.

For example:


<h1>{{ blog_post.title }}</h1>

<p>{{ blog_post.content }}</p>

<p>Hit count: {{ blog_post.hit_count.hits }}</p>

Finally, we displayed the hit count for a particular blog post by accessing the hits attribute of the HitCount object.

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