Why Does Django's Urlfield Truncate To 200 Characters By Default?

I'm fond of Django and use it regularly. I find most of its defaults sane, but one has always bothered me to the point that I override it on every project. The default max length o

Solution 1:

I can't say why the original max length was chosen, you would have to ask the authors of the patches you found. Note that MySQL restricts unique var chars to 255 characters, so choosing 200 avoids this problem.

Once the limit was chosen, changing it would have backwards compatibility issues. Since migrations were added in Django 1.7, it would be easier to make a change like this. If you feel strongly about changing it, the Django developers mailing list or ticket tracker is probably a better place to ask than stack overflow.

You might find the discussion on ticket 19515 interesting.