Django-blocklist

This is a Django app that implements IP-based blocklisting. Its BlocklistMiddleware performs the blocking, and its clean_blocklist management command deletes entries which have satisfied the cooldown period. Entries also have a reason field, used in reporting. There are utility functions to add/remove IPs, an admin, and several management commands.

This app is primarily for situations where server-level blocking is not available, e.g. on platform-as-a-service hosts like PythonAnywhere or Heroku. Being an application-layer solution, it's not as performant as blocking via firewall or web server process, but is suitable for moderate traffic sites. It also offers better integration with the application stack, for easier management.

Quick start

1. The PyPI package name is django-blocklist; add that to your requirements.txt or otherwise install it into your project's Python environment.

2. Add "django_blocklist" to settings.INSTALLED_APPS

3. Add "django_blocklist.middleware.BlocklistMiddleware" to settings.MIDDLEWARE

4. Run python manage.py migrate to create the django_blocklist_blockedip table.

5. Add IPs to the list (via management commands, utils.update_blocklist, or the admin).

6. Set up a cron job or equivalent to run manage.py clean_blocklist daily.

Management commands

Django-blocklist includes several management commands:

• clean_blocklist — remove entries that have fulfilled their cooldown period
• import_blocklist — convenience command for importing IPs from a file
• print_blocklist — print list of blocked IPs in plain text or JSON form
• remove_from_blocklist — remove one or more IPs
• report_blocklist — information on the current entries (see the sample report)
• search_blocklist — look for an IP in the list; in addition to info on stdout, returns an exit code of 0 if successful
• update_blocklist — add/update IPs; --skip-existing prevents updating existing records

See --help for each of these for more details.

Configuration

You can customize the following settings via a BLOCKLIST_CONFIG dict in your project settings:

• cooldown — Days to expire, for new entries; default 7
• denial-template — For the denial response; an f-string with {ip} and {cooldown} placeholders

Utility methods

The utils module defines some convenience functions:

• remove_from_blocklist(ip: str) — removes an entry, returning True if successful
• should_block(request: HttpRequest) — Checks the request IP and method against the blocklist.
• update_blocklist(ips: set, reason: str, cooldown: int, last_seen: datetime) — adds IPs to the blocklist (all args except ips are optional)

Development

• Project hub: django-blocklist on Gitlab
• Development is managed with Poetry
• Quickstart: python -m venv venv; source venv/bin/activate; poetry install
• The project's settings.py is minimal, just enough to run the tests and the admin
• Run tests: tox in project root to run the full test matrix, or use pytest to run specific tests under your installed Django
• Linting: ruff check django_blocklist
• manage.py runserver lets you try out the admin
• Merge requests and issues (tickets) are welcome!