Customising Oscar

Many parts of Oscar can be adapted to your needs like any other Django application:

  • Many settings control Oscar’s behaviour

  • The looks can be controlled by extending or overriding the templates

But as Oscar is built as a highly customisable and extendable framework, it doesn’t stop there. The behaviour of all Oscar apps can heavily be altered by injecting your own code.

To extend the behaviour of an Oscar core app, it needs to be forked, which is achieved with a simple management command. Afterwards, you should generally be able to override any class/model/view by just dropping it in the right place and giving it the same name.

In some cases, customising is slightly more involved. The following guides give plenty of examples for specific use cases:

For a deeper understanding of customising Oscar, the following documents are recommended:

Fork the Oscar app

If this is the first time you’re forking an Oscar app, you’ll need to create a root module under which all your forked apps will live:

$ mkdir yourappsfolder
$ touch yourappsfolder/__init__.py

Now you call the helper management command which creates some basic files for you. It is explained in detail in Forking an app. Run it like this:

$ ./manage.py oscar_fork_app order yourappsfolder
Creating package yourappsfolder/order
Creating admin.py
Creating app config
Creating models.py
Creating migrations folder
Replace the entry 'oscar.apps.order.apps.OrderConfig' with 'yourappsfolder.order.apps.OrderConfig' in INSTALLED_APPS

oscar_fork_app has an optional third argument, which allows specifying the sub-package name of the new app. For example, calling ./manage.py oscar_fork_app order yourproject/ yoursubpackage.order places the order app in the project_root/yourproject/yoursubpackage/order directory.

Replace Oscar’s app with your own in INSTALLED_APPS

You will need to let Django know that you replaced one of Oscar’s core apps. You can do that by replacing its entry in the INSTALLED_APPS setting, with that for your own app.

Note

Overrides of dashboard applications should follow overrides of core applications (basket, catalogue etc), since they depend on models, declared in the core applications. Otherwise, it could cause issues with Oscar’s dynamic model loading.

If you want to customise one of the dashboard applications, for instance yourappsfolder.dashboard.catalogue, you also need to fork the core dashboard application yourappsfolder.dashboard.

Example:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # all your non-Oscar apps
    ...
    # core applications
    'yourappsfolder.catalogue.apps.CatalogueConfig',
    'yourappsfolder.order.apps.OrderConfig',
    # dashboard applications
    'yourappsfolder.dashboard.apps.DashboardConfig',
    'yourappsfolder.dashboard.orders.apps.OrdersDashboardConfig',
    'yourappsfolder.dashboard.reports.apps.ReportsDashboardConfig',
]

Start customising!

You can now override every class (that is dynamically loaded, which is almost every class) in the app you’ve replaced. That means forms, views, strategies, etc. All you usually need to do is give it the same name and place it in a module with the same name.

Suppose you want to alter the way order numbers are generated. By default, the class oscar.apps.order.utils.OrderNumberGenerator is used. So just create a class within your order app which matches the module path from oscar: order.utils.OrderNumberGenerator. This could subclass the class from Oscar or not:

# yourproject/order/utils.py

from oscar.apps.order.utils import OrderNumberGenerator as CoreOrderNumberGenerator


class OrderNumberGenerator(CoreOrderNumberGenerator):

    def order_number(self, basket=None):
        num = super().order_number(basket)
        return "SHOP-%s" % num

To obtain an Oscar app’s app config instance, look it up in the Django app registry.