django-cities-light -- Simple django-cities alternative

This add-on provides models and commands to import country/city data into your database. The data is pulled from GeoNames and contains:

• country names
• optionnal city names

Spatial query support is not required by this application.

This application is very simple and is useful if you want to make a simple address book for example. If you intend to build a fully featured spatial database, you should use django-cities.

Installation

Install django-cities-light:

pip install django-cities-light

Or the development version:

pip install -e [email protected]:yourlabs/django-cities-light.git#egg=cities_light

Add cities_light to your INSTALLED_APPS.

You may not need the city model and database table. A project like betspire.com doesn't need it for instance. So the City model will be made 'abstract' if this setting is set as such:

CITIES_LIGHT_ENABLE_CITY=False

Now, run syncdb, it will only create tables for models that are not disabled:

./manage.py syncdb

Data update

Finnaly, populate your database with command:

./manage.py cities_light

This command is well documented, consult the help with:

./manage.py help cities_light

Filtering data import

An example is worth 1000 words: if you want to import only cities from France, USA and Belgium you could do as such:

import cities_light

def filter_city_import(sender, items, **kwargs):
    if items[8] not in ('FR', 'US', 'BE'):
        raise cities_light.InvalidItems()

cities_light.signals.city_items_pre_import.connect(filter_city_import)

Note: this signal gets a list rather than a City instance for performance reasons.

Configure logging

This command is made to be compatible with background usage like from cron, to keep the database fresh. So it doesn't do direct output. To get output from this command, simply configure a handler and formatter for cities_light logger. For example:

LOGGING = {
    'version': 1,
    'disable_existing_loggers': False,
    'formatters': {
        'simple': {
            'format': '%(levelname)s %(message)s'
        },
    },
    'handlers': {
        'console':{
            'level':'DEBUG',
            'class':'logging.StreamHandler',
            'formatter': 'simple'
        },
    },
    'loggers': {
        'cities_light': {
            'handlers':['console'],
            'propagate': True,
            'level':'DEBUG',
        },
        # also use this one to see SQL queries
        'django': {
            'handlers':['console'],
            'propagate': True,
            'level':'DEBUG',
        },
    }
}

Ajax autocomplete

If ajax_selects from django-ajax-selects, you should have two new channels usable right away:

• cities_light_country
• cities_light_city

Ideas for contribution

• django-modeltranslation support and alternateNames.txt
• country flags support

I might implement this in the next project or refactor of my projects that use django-cities-light. In the mean time, this app just works because it's so simple. I wonder if there's a bug ....