Main concepts

Cookie Group

The CookieGroup model represents a group of related cookies. Cookie groups can be either required or not. Users can accept or decline the use of the cookies in the non-required cookie groups.

Versions

Each cookie group has a “current version” set to the timestamp of the last added Cookie in it. When a user accepts a cookie group, the current version (at the time of consent) is saved.

Versions allow django-cookie-consent to check if new cookies have been introduced after the user has given consent for a cookie group, so that they can be prompted again to accept the new cookie(s).

Important attributes:

varname

The variable name that acts as unique identifier for the cookie group. You can use the value in template tags and filters to refer to a particular cookie group.

is_required

Required cookies are never deleted and users cannot accept or decline them. For example, Django’s default sessionid and csrftoken cookies are required for the correct functioning of your project. Without these cookies, the website will not work properly - so users can’t opt-out.

is_deletable

If a cookie group is marked as deletable, django-cookie-consent will try to delete the cookies in this group when the user declines the group, or through the cookie_consent.middleware.CleanCookiesMiddleware.

Cookie

The Cookie model represents as single cookie.

Saving user selection

A bit ironically, django-cookie-consent uses a cookie itself to store the user consent. By default, the name cookie_consent is used.

An example value of such a cookie could be:

optional=-1|social=2013-06-04T03:17:01.421395Z

The meaning of this is:

• the user declined the cookie group with varname optional

• the user accepted the cookie group with varname social, and specifically only the cookies that were created before the stated timestamp

Caching

django-cookie-consent keeps the non-required cookie groups and cookies in cache, to avoid hitting the database for each request. By default, the default Django cache is used. You can modify this, see Settings.

Note

Django’s default cache is a local-memory cache. Cache invalidation in one wsgi-server process will not propagate to other instances/processes, so you can temporarily see inconsistent results. It’s recommended to use a shared cache like Redis/Valkey or Memcache.