Configuration file#

Pretix reads its configuration from a configuration file. It tries to find this file at the following locations. It will try to read the file from the specified paths in the following order. The file that is found last will override the settings from the files found before.

PRETIX_CONFIG_FILE environment variable
/etc/pretix/pretix.cfg
~/.pretix.cfg
pretix.cfg in the current working directory

The file is expected to be in the INI format as specified in the Python documentation.

The config file may contain the following sections (all settings are optional and have default values). We suggest that you start from the examples given in one of the installation tutorials.

Note

The configuration file is the recommended way to configure pretix. However, you can also set them through environment variables. In this case, the syntax is PRETIX_SECTION_CONFIG. For example, to configure the setting password_reset from the [pretix] section, set PRETIX_PRETIX_PASSWORD_RESET=off in your environment.

pretix settings#

Example:

[pretix]
instance_name=pretix.de
url=http://localhost
currency=EUR
datadir=/data
plugins_default=pretix.plugins.sendmail,pretix.plugins.statistics

instance_name: The name of this installation. Default: pretix.de
url: The installation's full URL, without a trailing slash.
currency: The default currency as a three-letter code. Defaults to EUR.
cachedir: The local path to a directory where temporary files will be stored. Defaults to the cache directory below the datadir.
datadir: The local path to a data directory that will be used for storing user uploads and similar data. Defaults to the value of the environment variable DATA_DIR or data.
logdir: The local path to a directory where log files will be stored. Defaults to the logs directory below the datadir.
plugins_default: A comma-separated list of plugins that are enabled by default for all new events. Defaults to pretix.plugins.sendmail,pretix.plugins.statistics.
plugins_exclude: A comma-separated list of plugins that are not available even though they are installed. Defaults to an empty string.
plugins_show_meta: Whether to show authors and versions of plugins, defaults to on.
auth_backends: A comma-separated list of available auth backends. Defaults to pretix.base.auth.NativeAuthBackend.
registration: Enables or disables the registration of new admin users. Defaults to off.
password_reset: Enables or disables password reset. Defaults to on.
long_sessions: Enables or disables the "keep me logged in" button. Defaults to on.
ecb_rates: By default, pretix periodically downloads currency rates from the European Central Bank as well as other authorities that are used to print tax amounts in the customer currency on invoices for some currencies. Set to off to disable this feature. Defaults to on.
audit_comments: Enables or disables nagging staff users for leaving comments on their sessions for auditability. Defaults to off.
obligatory_2fa: Enables or disables obligatory usage of two-factor authentication for users of the pretix backend. Can be True to make two-factor authentication obligatory for all users or staff to make it only obligatory to users with admin permissions. Defaults to False.
trust_x_forwarded_for: Specifies whether the X-Forwarded-For header can be trusted. Only set to on if you have a reverse proxy that actively removes and re-adds the header to make sure the correct client IP is the first value. Defaults to off.
trust_x_forwarded_proto: Specifies whether the X-Forwarded-Proto header can be trusted. Only set to on if you have a reverse proxy that actively removes and re-adds the header to make sure the correct value is set. Defaults to off.
trust_x_forwarded_host: Specifies whether the X-Forwarded-Host header can be trusted. Only set to on if you have a reverse proxy that actively removes and re-adds the header to make sure the correct value is set. Defaults to off.
csp_log: Log violations of the Content Security Policy (CSP). Defaults to on.
csp_additional_header: Specifies a CSP header that will be merged with pretix's default header. For example, if you set this to script-src https://mycdn.com, pretix will add https://mycdn.com as an additional allowed source to all CSP headers. Empty by default.
loglevel: Set console and file log level (DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR or CRITICAL). Defaults to INFO.
request_id_header: Specifies the name of a header that should be used for logging request IDs. Off by default.

Locale settings#

Example:

[locale]
default=de
timezone=Europe/Berlin

default: The system's default locale. Default: en
timezone: The system's default timezone as a pytz name. Default: UTC

Database settings#

Example:

[database]
backend=postgresql
name=pretix
user=pretix
password=abcd
host=localhost
port=3306
advisory_lock_index=1
disable_server_side_cursors=0
sslmode=require
sslrootcert=/etc/pretix/postgresql-ca.crt
sslcert=/etc/pretix/postgresql-client-crt.crt
sslkey=/etc/pretix/postgresql-client-key.key

backend: One of sqlite3 and postgresql. Default: sqlite3.
name: The database's name. Default: db.sqlite3.
user, password, host, port: Connection details for the database connection. Empty by default.
advisory_lock_index: On PostgreSQL, pretix uses the "advisory lock" feature. However, advisory locks use a server-wide name space and and are not scoped to a specific database. If you run multiple pretix applications with the same PostgreSQL server, you should set separate values for this setting (integers up to 256).
disable_server_side_cursors: On PostgreSQL pretix might use server side cursors for certain operations. This is generally fine but will break in specific circumstances, for example when connecting to PostgreSQL through a PGBouncer configured with a transaction pool mode. Off by default (i.e. by default server side cursors will be used).
sslmode, sslrootcert: Connection TLS details for the PostgreSQL database connection. Possible values of sslmode are disable, allow, prefer, require, verify-ca, and verify-full. sslrootcert should be the accessible path of the ca certificate. Both values are empty by default.
sslcert, sslkey: Connection mTLS details for the PostgreSQL database connection. It's also necessary to specify sslmode and sslrootcert parameters, please check the correct values from the TLS part. sslcert should be the accessible path of the client certificate. sslkey should be the accessible path of the client key. All values are empty by default.

Database replica settings#

If you use a replicated database setup, pretix expects that the default database connection always points to the primary database node. Routing read queries to a replica on database layer is strongly discouraged since this can lead to inaccurate such as more tickets being sold than are actually available.

However, pretix can still make use of a database replica to keep some expensive queries with that can tolerate some latency from your primary database, such as backend search queries. The replica configuration section can have the same settings as the database section (except for the backend setting) and will default back to the database settings for all values that are not given. This way, you just need to specify the settings that are different for the replica.

Example:

[replica]
host=192.168.0.2

URLs#

Example:

[urls]
media=/media/
static=/static/

media: The URL to be used to serve user-uploaded content. You should not need to modify this. Default: /media/
static: The URL to be used to serve static files. You should not need to modify this. Default: /static/

Email#

Example:

[mail]
from=hello@localhost
host=127.0.0.71
user=pretix
password=foobar
port=1025
tls=on
ssl=off

host, port: The SMTP Host to connect to. Defaults to localhost and 25.
user, password: The SMTP user data to use for the connection. Empty by default.
tls, ssl: Use STARTTLS or SSL for the SMTP connection. Off by default.
from: The email address to set as From header in outgoing emails by the system. Default: pretix@localhost
from_notifications: The email address to set as From header in admin notification emails by the system. Defaults to the value of from.
from_organizers: The email address to set as From header in outgoing emails by the system sent on behalf of organizers. Defaults to the value of from.
custom_sender_verification_required: If this is on (the default), organizers need to verify email addresses they want to use as senders in their event.
custom_sender_spf_string: If this is set to a valid SPF string, pretix will show a warning if organizers use a sender address from a domain that does not include this value.
custom_smtp_allow_private_networks: If this is off (the default), custom SMTP servers cannot be private network addresses.
admins: Comma-separated list of email addresses that should receive a report about every error code 500 thrown by pretix.

Django settings#

Example:

[django]
secret=j1kjps5a5&4ilpn912s7a1!e2h!duz^i3&idu@_907s$wrz@x-
debug=off
passwords_argon2=on

secret: The secret to be used by Django for signing and verification purposes. If this setting is not provided, pretix will generate a random secret on the first start and will store it in the filesystem for later usage.
secret_fallback0 ... secret_fallback9: Prior versions of the secret to be used by Django for signing and verification purposes that will still be accepted but no longer be used for new signing.
debug: Whether or not to run in debug mode. Default is False.

Warning

Never set this to True in production!
passwords_argon: Use the argon2 algorithm for password hashing. Disable on systems with a small number of CPU cores (currently less than 8).
profile: Enable code profiling for a random subset of requests. Disabled by default, see Performance Monitoring for details.

Metrics#

If you want to fetch internally collected prometheus-style metrics you need to configure the credentials for the metrics endpoint and enable it:

[metrics]
enabled=true
user=your_user
passphrase=mysupersecretpassphrase

Currently, metrics-collection requires a redis server to be available.

Memcached#

You can use an existing memcached server as pretix's caching backend:

[memcached]
location=127.0.0.1:11211

location: The location of memcached, either a host:port combination or a socket file.

If no memcached is configured, pretix will use redis for caching. If neither is configured, pretix will not use any caching.

Note

If you use memcached and you deploy pretix across multiple servers, you should use one shared memcached instance, not multiple ones, because cache invalidations would not be propagated otherwise.

Redis#

If a redis server is configured, pretix can use it for locking, caching and session storage to speed up various operations:

[redis]
location=redis://127.0.0.1:6379/1
sessions=false
sentinels=[
        ["sentinel_host_1", 26379],
        ["sentinel_host_2", 26379],
        ["sentinel_host_3", 26379]
    ]
password=password
ssl_cert_reqs=required
ssl_ca_certs=/etc/pretix/redis-ca.pem
ssl_keyfile=/etc/pretix/redis-client-crt.pem
ssl_certfile=/etc/pretix/redis-client-key.key

location: The location of redis, as a URL of the form redis://[:password]@localhost:6379/0 or unix://[:password]@/path/to/socket.sock?db=0
sessions: When this is set to True, redis will be used as the session storage.
sentinels: Configures redis sentinels to use. If you don't want to use redis sentinels, you should omit this option. If this is set, redis via sentinels will be used instead of plain redis. In this case the location should be of the form redis://my_master/0. The sentinels variable should be a json serialized list of sentinels, each being a list with the two elements hostname and port. You cannot provide a password within the location when using sentinels. Note that the configuration format requires you to either place the entire value on one line or make sure all values are indented by at least one space.
password: If your redis setup doesn't require a password or you already specified it in the location you can omit this option. If this is set it will be passed to redis as the connection option PASSWORD.
ssl_cert_reqs: If this is set it will be passed to redis as the connection option SSL_CERT_REQS. Possible values are none, optional, and required.
ssl_ca_certs: If your redis setup doesn't require TLS you can omit this option. If this is set it will be passed to redis as the connection option SSL_CA_CERTS. Possible value is the ca path.
ssl_keyfile: If your redis setup doesn't require mTLS you can omit this option. If this is set it will be passed to redis as the connection option SSL_KEYFILE. Possible value is the keyfile path.
ssl_certfile: If your redis setup doesn't require mTLS you can omit this option. If this is set it will be passed to redis as the connection option SSL_CERTFILE. Possible value is the certfile path.

If redis is not configured, pretix will store sessions and locks in the database. If memcached is configured, memcached will be used for caching instead of redis.

Translations#

pretix comes with a number of translations. All languages are enabled by default. If you want to limit the languages available in your installation, you can enable a set of languages like this:

[languages]
enabled=en,de

Some of the languages them are marked as "incubating", which means they can usually only be selected in development mode. If you want to use them nevertheless, you can activate them like this:

[languages]
allow_incubating=pt-br,da

You can also tell pretix about additional paths where it will search for translations:

[languages]
path=/path/to/my/translations

For a given language (e.g. pt-br), pretix will then look in the specific sub-folder, e.g. /path/to/my/translations/pt_BR/LC_MESSAGES/django.po.

Celery task queue#

For processing long-running tasks asynchronously, pretix requires the celery task queue. For communication between the web server and the task workers in both direction, a messaging queue and a result backend is needed. You can use a redis database for both directions, or an AMQP server (e.g. RabbitMQ) as a broker and redis or your database as a result backend:

[celery]
broker=amqp://guest:guest@localhost:5672//
backend=redis://localhost/0
broker_transport_options="{}"
backend_transport_options="{}"

RabbitMQ might be the better choice if you have a complex, multi-server, high-performance setup, but as you already should have a redis instance ready for session and lock storage, we recommend redis for convenience. See the Celery documentation for more details.

The two transport_options entries can be omitted in most cases. If they are present they need to be a valid JSON dictionary. For possible entries in that dictionary see the Celery documentation.

It is possible the use Redis with TLS/mTLS for the broker or the backend. To do so, it is necessary to specify the TLS identifier rediss, the ssl mode ssl_cert_reqs and optionally specify the CA (TLS) ssl_ca_certs, cert ssl_certfile and key ssl_keyfile (mTLS) path as encoded string. the following uri describes the format and possible parameters:

rediss://0.0.0.0:6379/1?ssl_cert_reqs=required&ssl_ca_certs=%2Fetc%2Fpretix%2Fredis-ca.pem&ssl_certfile=%2Fetc%2Fpretix%2Fredis-client-crt.pem&ssl_keyfile=%2Fetc%2Fpretix%2Fredis-client-key.key

To use redis with sentinels set the broker or backend to sentinel://sentinel_host_1:26379;sentinel_host_2:26379/0 and the respective transport_options to {"master_name":"mymaster"}. If your redis instances behind the sentinel have a password use sentinel://:my_password@sentinel_host_1:26379;sentinel_host_2:26379/0. If your redis sentinels themselves have a password set the transport_options to {"master_name":"mymaster","sentinel_kwargs":{"password":"my_password"}}.

Sentry#

pretix has native support for sentry, a tool that you can use to track errors in the application. If you want to use sentry, you need to set a DSN in the configuration file:

[sentry]
dsn=https://<key>:<secret>@sentry.io/<project>
traces_sample_rate=0.5
traces_sample_token=xyz

dsn: You will be given this value by your sentry installation.
traces_sample_rate: Sample rate for performance monitoring.
traces_sample_token: If this token is found in a query string, a trace will always be sampled.

Caching#

You can adjust some caching settings to control how much storage pretix uses:

[cache]
tickets=48  ; Number of hours tickets (PDF, passbook, …) are cached

Secret length#

If you are really paranoid, you can increase the length of random strings pretix uses in various places like order codes, secrets in the ticket QR codes, etc. Example:

[entropy]
; Order code needs to be < 16 characters, default is 5
order_code=5
; Ticket secret needs to be < 64 characters, default is 32
ticket_secret=32
; Voucher code needs to be < 255 characters, default is 16
voucher_code=16

External tools#

pretix can make use of some external tools if they are installed. Currently, they are all optional. Example:

[tools]
pdftk=/usr/bin/pdftk

Maximum upload file sizes#

You can configure the maximum file size for uploading various files:

[pretix_file_upload]
; Max upload size for images in MiB, defaults to 10 MiB
max_size_image = 12
; Max upload size for favicons in MiB, defaults to 1 MiB
max_size_favicon = 2
; Max upload size for email attachments of manually sent emails in MiB, defaults to 10 MiB
max_size_email_attachment = 15
; Max upload size for email attachments of automatically sent emails in MiB, defaults to 1 MiB
max_size_email_auto_attachment = 2
; Max upload size for other files in MiB, defaults to 10 MiB
; This includes all file upload type order questions
max_size_other = 100

GeoIP#

pretix can optionally make use of a GeoIP database for some features. It needs a file in mmdb format, for example GeoLite2 or GeoAcumen:

[geoip]
path=/var/geoipdata/
filename_country=GeoLite2-Country.mmdb