Include urls without importing package

[timobrembeck]

I don't want to have the django-debug-toolbar package installed in my production environment, so I'm looking for alternatives to a slightly "dirty" import which is not at the top of the file (see PEP-402):

if "debug_toolbar" in settings.INSTALLED_APPS:
    import debug_toolbar
    urlpatterns.append(url(r"^__debug__/", include(debug_toolbar.urls)))

But the obvious string-module-path

    urlpatterns.append(url(r"^__debug__/", include("debug_toolbar.urls")))

fails due to the error ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'debug_toolbar.urls'.

However, I noticed that

urlpatterns.append(url(r"^__debug__/", include("debug_toolbar.toolbar")))

seems to work, so I wonder why this isn't documented. Are there any downsides to this approach, or might this stop to work in future versions of the django debug toolbar?

Thanks for any comments on this!

Django version: 3.2.7
Django Debug Toolbar version: 3.2.2

[matthiask]

To be honest: I have no idea why we couldn't make include("debug_toolbar.urls") work (except for time and energy, always excellent reasons)

Maybe it has to do with old ways of declaring URLconf namespaces or maybe something to do with the magical auto-installation of the toolbar which has been removed a few years ago.

[tim-schilling]

Yarp, I agree here. This should be possible now if it wasn't in the past.