Upgrading

Your django-helpdesk installation can be upgraded to the latest version using the release notes below.

Prerequisites

Please consult the Installation instructions for general instructions and tips. The tips below are based on modifications of the original installation instructions.

Public ticket listing API dates now use ISO 8601

This is a breaking change for consumers of PublicTicketListingSerializer. The created and due_date fields now return ISO 8601 timestamps, such as 2026-09-24T12:00:00Z, instead of translated relative strings such as 2 days ago. An unset due_date returns JSON null.

If you consume this API, you will need to parse the ISO 8601 and render human-readable dates in the user’s language and timezone yourself, using e.g. Intl.RelativeTimeFormat.

Form rendering no longer needs django-bootstrap4-form

django-bootstrap4-form has been removed. It emitted Bootstrap 3 markup (form-group, control-label, has-error, <div class="checkbox">), none of which exists in the Bootstrap 5 stylesheet this project ships, so the affected fields had lost their spacing and their checkboxes and radios were unstyled. Forms are now rendered by a template inside django-helpdesk itself.

Remove 'bootstrap4form' from your INSTALLED_APPS. Nothing else is required, and the package can be uninstalled unless something else in your project uses it.

If you have overridden user_settings.html, edit_ticket.html or public_create_ticket_base.html, replace {{ form|bootstrap4form }} with:

{% load bootstrap5_form %}
{% bootstrap5_form form %}

Optional integrations are no longer installed by default

Two packages used to be installed with every copy of django-helpdesk even though the project itself never imports them, and neither is needed for a default install. They are now optional extras:

Feature	Install with	Needed if you
Celery mail polling	pip install django-helpdesk[celery]	schedule helpdesk.tasks instead of running get_email from cron
Akismet spam check	pip install django-helpdesk[spam]	set AKISMET_API_KEY or TYPEPAD_ANTISPAM_API_KEY

If you would rather not work out which apply to you, pip install django-helpdesk[all] restores exactly what earlier releases pulled in.

The Celery extra also brings django-celery-beat, which that setup has always required but which was never declared.

Neither of these breaks a running site on its own. helpdesk/urls.py already imports helpdesk.tasks inside a try/except ImportError, and text_is_spam() already treated a missing Akismet package as “not spam”, so an upgrade without the extras means the scheduled task is not registered and submissions stop being spam checked, rather than anything raising.

django-cleanup is deliberately not on this list. It activates as soon as it is listed in INSTALLED_APPS, which is what our own installation instructions suggest, so making it optional would stop a documented configuration from starting at all. It stays a hard dependency.

0.2 -> 0.3

• Under INSTALLED_APPS, bootstrapform needs to be replaced with bootstrap4form

• Unless turning off pinax_teams, add the following to INSTALLED_APPS for pinax_teams:

  "account",
  "pinax.invitations",
  "pinax.teams",
  "reversion",
  

• If using send_templated_mail, then it now needs to be imported from helpdesk.templated_email