Recently, one of our clients wanted to restrict signups on their platform to a list of whitelisted email addresses. This was urgent, I didn't have the time to build a form to upload the csv files. Ideally, what  I would have done was have one of our frontend devs

  1. build a form on the admin dashboard
  2. I create a model and an endpoint for uploading the files
  3. Use celery to process handle to data import especially if the file contains a lot of emails. Thank goodness this had just 700+ emails
  4. We connect test, and voila

But we didn't have the luxury of this as we were seriously trying to beat another deadline.

So here is how I hacked it in 15 - 20 mins and went back to other important things.

First thing was to create  model, then  add the csv file to the project's root dir and finally run a small function that imports the data into the model.

I make use of django-extensions which provides a more powerful django shell. You should check it out. 

#models.py

class Whitelist(models.Model):
    """
    A list of whitelisted email addresses that are allowed to signup
    """
    id = models.UUIDField(primary_key=True, default=uuid.uuid4, editable=False)
    email = models.EmailField(unique=True)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.email

Run migrations after this

To import the data, follow these commands

./manage.py shell_plus
import csv

 with open('whitelist.csv', 'r') as cv:
   emails = csv.reader(cv, delimiter=' ')
   for email in emails:
   Whitelist.objects.create(email=email)

This will import the data into the whitelist.

I will write another post on how I handled the registration part where only whitelisted emails were allowed to register (maybe I should build a small package to handle this). But if you want to go ahead just incase I never put up that post, the trick is to have a custom registration serializer and add a check for email addresses before a registration can be completed.