Get List of Current Users

We get this question a good amount so we decided to create a little guide on how to solve it. Below was designed for Django 1.9 but will likely work in future iterations of Django.

This is not a perfect method for getting a list of current users, but it's definitely a doable one. So, let's get started.

First off, this assumes that settings.py has the following:

SESSION_EXPIRE_AT_BROWSER_CLOSE = True

Docs - Doing the above setting ensures that sessions actually end, which will give us a more accurate count of who is currently logged in or, more specifically, who has a currently active session.

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.contrib.sessions.models import Session
from django.utils import timezone

def get_current_users():
    active_sessions = Session.objects.filter(expire_date__gte=timezone.now())
    user_id_list = []
    for session in active_sessions:
        data = session.get_decoded()
        user_id_list.append(data.get('_auth_user_id', None))
    # Query all logged in users based on id list
    return User.objects.filter(id__in=user_id_list)

Now, you can use the function get_current_users() anywhere to get a QuerySet of users. This means that you can do things like:

queryset = get_current_users()
print(queryset)
print(queryset.exists())
print(queryset.count())

Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

Enjoy!