Change the Wagtail site domain via a management command

For deployment purposes, a command which can update the domain of a Wagtail website can be useful.

You can create a custom management command which helps you doing this. Start with creating a file <app>/management/commands/wagtail_change_site_domain.py.

You can call the command as follows:

1./manage.py wagtail_change_site_domain --site_id=1 --new_site_domain=yellowduck.be:443

The implementation is like this:

<app>/management/commands/wagtail_change_site_domain.py

 1from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand
 2
 3from wagtail.core.models import Site
 4
 5class Command(BaseCommand):
 6    """
 7    Change site domain and port for wagtail.
 8    Example:
 9        ./manage.py wagtail_change_site_domain --site_id=2 --new_site_domain=yellowduck.be:443
10    """
11
12    def add_arguments(self, parser):
13        parser.add_argument("--site_id", type=int, default=1)
14        parser.add_argument("--new_site_domain", required=True)
15
16    def handle(self, *args, **options):
17    
18        site_id = options["site_id"]
19        new_site_domain = options["new_site_domain"]
20
21        domain = new_site_domain
22        port = 80
23        if ":" in new_site_domain:
24            domain, port = new_site_domain.split(":")
25
26        try:
27            site = Site.objects.get(pk=site_id)
28            site.hostname = domain
29            site.port = port
30            site.save()
31    
32            self.stdout.write(f"Domain changed to {new_site_domain}")
33        except Site.DoesNotExist:
34            self.stderr.write(f"No site with id {site_id}"")

The add_arguments allows us to easily define the required and options arguments for the command. We define 2 of them: --site_id and --new_site_domain.

The handle function is called when you run the command.

We start with parsing the command-line arguments. For the port and domain, we check if it's specified in the argument new_site_domain and use that if specified. We wrap this in a try/catch to properly handle an invalid --site_id value.

We then lookup the site by it's ID using the Site model, set the hostname and port and save it.