How to disable Django’s csrf protection only in certain cases

apicsrf-protectiondjango

I'm trying to write a site in Django where the API URLs are the same as user-facing URLs. But I'm having trouble with pages which use POST requests and CSRF protection. For example, if I have a page /foo/add I want to be able to send POST requests to it in two ways:

As an end user (authenticated using a session cookie) submitting a form. This requires CSRF protection.
As an API client (authenticated using a HTTP request header). This will fail if CSRF protection is enabled.

I have found various ways of disabling CSRF, such as @csrf_exempt, but these all disable it for the entire view. Is there any way of enabling/disabling it at a more fine-grained level? Or am I just going to have to implement by own CSRF protection from scratch?

Best Answer

Modify `urls.py`

If you manage your routes in urls.py, you can wrap your desired routes with csrf_exempt() to exclude them from the CSRF verification middleware.

for instance,

from django.views.decorators.csrf import csrf_exempt
urlpatterns = patterns(
    # ...
    # Will exclude `/api/v1/test` from CSRF 
    url(r'^api/v1/test', csrf_exempt(TestApiHandler.as_view()))
    # ...
)

Alternatively, as a Decorator

Some may find the use of the @csrf_exempt decorator more suitable for their needs

for instance,

from django.views.decorators.csrf import csrf_exempt
from django.http import HttpResponse

@csrf_exempt
def my_view(request):
    return HttpResponse('Hello world')

Related Solutions

Django CSRF framework cannot be disabled and is breaking the site

Yes, Django csrf framework can be disabled.

To manually exclude a view function from being handled by any CSRF middleware, you can use the csrf_exempt decorator, found in the django.views.decorators.csrf module. For example: (see doc)

from django.views.decorators.csrf import csrf_exempt                                          
@csrf_exempt                                                                                  
def my_view:                                                                            
    return Httpresponse("hello world")

..and then remove {% csrf_token %} inside the forms from your template,or leave other things unchanged if you have not included it in your forms.

Mysql – How to temporarily disable a foreign key constraint in MySQL

Try DISABLE KEYS or

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;

Make sure to

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1;

after.