Django Metabase Codebase

Disclaimer: This codebase is not suitable for production and is solely for the purpose of demonstration at the Djangocon Africa 2025 Conference on my session topic: "Building Secure, User-Specific Dashboards with Django and Metabase."

Purpose

This codebase is for the illustration of how a combination of Metabase and Django can be used to build secure and user-specific dashboards.

Data Source

The data used in this project was gotten from the Sample database in Metabase with some modifications made to it. These modifications include:

• Added a new affiliate table

• Added a referral column to the 'People' table with randomly generated values that matched the affiliate_id values in the affiliate table.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+
• Docker& Docker Compose
• Postgres database
• Git

Setup

• Clone the git repository

git clone https://github.com/Nancy9ice/django_metabase_codebase.git

• get into the root folder

cd django_metabase_codebase

• Setup a virtual environment and activate the virtual environment

• Install the libraries in the requirements.txt

pip install -r requirements.txt

• Create necessary tables and insert data by running the scripts in the sql_scripts folder.

• Setup Metabase

  • Get into the Metabase directory

  cd metabase

  • Run the Metabase docker container

  docker compose up -d

  • Add your postgres database to Metabase as a new database

  • Create a dashboard similar to this and ensure it has a filter

  

  • Follow this guide to publish the static embed for the dashboard.

  • Ensure that you indicated the filter to be a locked parameter as shown in the image below. Also, ensure that the dashboard id in line 10 (in image below) matches the id in the affiliate_dashboard views.py

  

• Now that Metabase is fully setup, add a .env file in the root folder assigning the correct values to the following variables

METABASE_SITE_URL= # This is the url of the metabase application
METABASE_SECRET_KEY= # This is in the static embed of the dashboard
DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=

Follow this guide to generate the Django secret key.

Running the Demo

• Change directory into the django_metabase folder (the one in the root folder) if you're still in the metabase folder.

cd ../django_metabase

• Run DB migrations

python manage.py makemigrations

• Create the authorized users (eg. mary_osei) in the Django Admin page (http://localhost:8000/admin/)

• Launch the application

python manage.py runserver

• Access the application URL of one of the affiliates (http://localhost:8000/affiliate_dashboard/Mary%20Osei/). Then login with the credentials you created for this user at the admin page.

• A successful login should show this: