Django – How to create unique slug for posts

Creating unique slugs will help us to create beautiful URLs in Django websites.

/* URL with post id or record id */
https://example.com/article/123

/* URL with unique slug */
https://example.com/article/post-slug

While creating the Model itself, we need to create a field for slug as follows

post_slug = models.SlugField(verbose_name='Slug', unique=True, null=True, blank=True)

Write a save() function to process the slug while creating the post. Use following code to generate unique slug for a post when created.

def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
    # Check if slug field is empty
    if self.speaker_slug is None:
        # Function to create slug for current post based on post title
        slug = slugify(self.speaker_first_name + ' ' + self.speaker_last_name)

        # Check if this slug name already exists for any other posts
        temp = Speaker.objects.all().filter(speaker_slug=slug)

        if temp.count() == 0:
            # If no post record have this slug, then assign this slug to the current post
            self.post_slug= slug
        else:
            # If the slug we got already exists to some other post record. Loop through to add numbers at end
            flag = False

            # Initialize with 2 so if example slug already exists, we start with assigning example-2
            count = 2

            # Loop through the same process of generating unique slug
            while flag == False:
                # Function to create slug for current post record based on post title and count
                slug = slugify(self.speaker_first_name + ' ' + self.speaker_last_name + ' ' + str(count))

                # Check if this new slug too exists for some other post record
                if self.check_if_slug_exists(slug) == False:
                    # Assign this slug to the current post record and break the loop
                    flag = True
                    self.post_slug = slug
                else:
                    # Increase the count and try next version of the slug starting loop again.
                    count = count+1

    # Save all the changes to the post record
    super(Speaker, self).save(*args, **kwargs)

This example is based on class based views (CBV) in Django.