Site-specific settings

There are several settings that need to be defined within Argus, for example:

See How to change site-specific settings

List of settings and environment variables

Warning

Environment variables and Argus settings may contain sensitive data, such as login credentials, secrets and passwords. Be mindful when setting these variables, and use appropriate safety precautions. For example, do not check your localsettings.py files into version control.

Django-specific settings

  • DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is the environment variable to invoke the Django settings module, or settings file. For a development environment, reasonable defaults are provided in argus.site.settings.dev. In production, a settings.py file should be created and invoked here.

  • SECRET_KEY is the Django secret key for this particular Argus instance. It contains a minimum of 50 random characters. The recommended way to generate this key is calling the command:

    $ python manage.py gen_secret_key

    Warning

    Keep the SECRET_KEY secret, as it is relevant to the security and integrity of your Argus instance.

Settings for adding additional Django apps

  • OVERRIDING_APPS is a list of dicts of additional apps added before the default list of INSTALLED_APPS which means that templates and static files found here can override what comes later. Environment variable: ARGUS_OVERRIDING_APPS

  • EXTRA_APPS is a list of dicts of additional apps added after the default list of INSTALLED_APPS which means that templates and static files found here add extra templates and static files without overriding what is already there. Environment variable: ARGUS_EXTRA_APPS

Format of the app settings

Both settings are a list of dicts.

App

To add an app, the minimal content of the dict is:

{ "app_name": "myapp" }

“myapp” is the same string you would normally put into INSTALLED_APPS.

Settings

You can overwrite any setting with the “settings”-key:

{
    "settings": {
        "LOGIN_URL": "/magic/"
    }
}

This is useful for settings that do not belong to specific apps.

You can set settings for an app too:

{
    "app_name": "myapp",
    "settings": {
        "MYAPP_MAGIC_NUMBER": 785464279385649275692
    }
}
Urls

There is an experimental way of also overriding or extending the root urls.py in argus.site.

Warning

This format is subject to change. Do not override the urls this way in production just yet.

There are two possible formats:

  1. Without namespace:

    {
    "app_name": "myapp",
    "urls": {
        "path": "myapp/",
        "urlpatterns_module": "myapp.urls"
    }
}

    This is translated to:

    path("myapp/", include("myapp.urls"))

  2. With namespace:

    {
    "app_name": "myapp",
    "urls": {
        "path": "myapp/",
        "urlpatterns_module": "myapp.urls",
        "namespace": "mynamespace"
    }
}

    This is translated to:

    path("myapp/", include("myapp.urls", "mynamespace"))

This assumes that myapp.urls contains a variable named urlpatterns with the defined urls of the app.

Context processors

Optionally, one or more context processors can be added to the end of the context processors list of the django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates template backend.

Format:

{
    "app_name": "holiday_cheer",
    "context_processors": [
        "holiday_cheer.context_processors.date_context",
        "holiday_cheer.context_processors.holidays"
    ]
}

Context processors that are not specific to an app can also be set:

{
    "context_processors": [
        "django.template.context_processors.debug"
    ]
}
Middleware

Optionally, additional middlewares can be added to the MIDDLEWARE-setting.

Format:

{
    "app_name": "holiday_cheer",
    "middleware": {
        "holiday_cheer.appended_middleware": "end",
        "holiday_cheer.prepended_middleware": "start"
    }
}

Subformat:

"dotted-path-to-middleware": ACTION

Adding middleware is trickier than other settings as the order matters. The default is appending (ACTION is “end” or a random string), but it is also possible to prepend (ACTION is “start”). A prepended middleware will be run before the security- and session middlewares which might not be what you want.

Middleware not belonging to an app can also be added:

{
    "middleware": {
        "django.middleware.cache.GZipMiddleware": "end"
    }
}

Database settings

  • DATABASE_URL contains the URL and port, as well as username, password, and name of the database to be used by Argus.

A common value in development would be:

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://argus_user:superSecretPassword@localhost:5432/argus_db

When DATABASE_URL is set, the database engine is automatically configured to use the django_psycopg_infinity backend, which provides infinity timestamp support with psycopg3.

  • DATABASE_ENGINE defaults to "django_psycopg_infinity.backends.postgresql".

If you override DATABASES directly instead of using DATABASE_URL, you must set the ENGINE to the same value:

DATABASES = {
    "default": {
        "ENGINE": "django_psycopg_infinity.backends.postgresql",
        ...
    }
}

Using the standard django.db.backends.postgresql engine will work for most operations but will not correctly handle infinity timestamps.

Task queue settings

  • By default, TASKS is set to:

    TASKS = {
    "default": {
        "BACKEND": "django_tasks_db.DatabaseBackend",
    }
}

This uses the new database backed queue, and you will need to run a database worker, see the production Using a task queue documentation.

Bypass the use of the database backed queue by changing to:

TASKS = {
    "default": {
        "BACKEND": "django_tasks.backends.immediate.ImmediateBackend",
    }
}

This is currently relevant if SEND_NOTIFICATIONS is set to False, or during development.

You will not need to run a worker for this, but as there are features planned that depend on a task queue, please try to stick to the default.

Incident settings

  • INDELIBLE_INCIDENTS protects incidents from being deleted. The default is True. This can also be set via the environment variable ARGUS_INDELIBLE_INCIDENTS.

Notification settings

  • ARGUS_SEND_NOTIFICATIONS allows sending or suppressing notifications. Default values are 1 in production and 0 otherwise.

  • EMAIL_HOST contains the smarthost (domain name) to send email through.

  • EMAIL_PORT (optional) email port. Defaults to 587 in production.

In the settings file there is also the variable MEDIA_PLUGINS, which holds the paths to the media classes and determines which notification plugins are available to send notifications by.

Email is enabled by default and uses Django’s email backend. There are multiple email backends available that Argus’ plugin supports. It is recommended to simply switch out the email backend instead of replacing this plugin.

SMS is disabled by default, since there is no standardized way of sending SMS messages. The only supported way at the moment is Sikt’s internal email-to-SMS gateway.

Enabling the email-to-SMS gateway

Argus supports sending SMS text messages via an email-to-SMS gateway, provided that this gateway conforms to the following interface:

The gateway receives email sent to a specific address. The email must contain the recipient’s phone number in the subject line. The body of the email will be sent as a text message to this number.

Argus comes with an SMS notification class that supports this kind of interface. To enable it:

Using the fallback notification filter

The setting ARGUS_FALLBACK_FILTER is a dict, by default undefined. You can set this to ensure a systemwide fallback filter for everyone:

Examples:

Do not send notifications on ACKED events:

ARGUS_FALLBACK_FILTER = {"acked": False}

Ignore low priority incidents by default:

ARGUS_FALLBACK_FILTER = {"maxlevel": 3}

Do both:

ARGUS_FALLBACK_FILTER = {"acked": False, "maxlevel": 3}

Token settings

Ticket system settings

TICKET_PLUGIN, TICKET_ENDPOINT, TICKET_AUTHENTICATION_SECRET, TICKET_INFORMATION are all described in Configuring a ticket plugin.

Frontend settings

  • INCIDENT_TABLE_COLUMN_LAYOUTS allows adding one or more choosable incident list column layouts in addition to the built-in layout. Format:

    INCIDENT_TABLE_COLUMN_LAYOUTS = {
    "default": [
        "row_select",
        "combined_status",
        "source",
        "description",
    ]
}

    See Table columns for the built-in layout and a list of all available built-in column types.

The old, deprecated variant of INCIDENT_TABLE_COLUMN_LAYOUTS, it only supported a single column layout.

Special environment settings

  • BANNER_MESSAGE is a message displayed below the navbar in a banner. It can be used to communicate an important message to the users on all Argus pages, for example, to announce maintenance work or indicate that the Argus instance is running in demo mode. The default value is None. If set it should only contain plain text, not HTML.

  • Environment variable: ARGUS_BANNER_MESSAGE

  • Note: To enable the banner, the context processor argus.htmx.context_processors.banner_message must be in the context processors list in the django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates template backend.

  • The banner can be customized per theme by setting CSS variables in a theme definition: --color-banner (border/background accent), --color-banner-content (text), and --banner-bg-opacity (background opacity as a percentage, default 25%). See Themes and styling for how to customize themes.

Debugging settings

  • DEBUG enables or disables debug-mode.

  • TEMPLATE_DEBUG (optional) provides a convenient way to turn debugging on and off for templates. If undefined it will default to the value of DEBUG.

PyPI settings

  • PYPI_URL is the URL used to check for the latest version of Argus. The default is a proxy server called https://pypi-proxy.sokrates.edupaas.no. The proxy is used so we can get a sense of how many people use Argus and what versions they are running. If you do not wish to use the Proxy, simply change the URL to https://pypi.org.