How can I disable Django's csrf protection only in certain cases?

Question

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:

1. As an end user (authenticated using a session cookie) submitting a form. This requires CSRF protection.
2. 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?

Answer 1

There is a section of Django's CSRF Protection documentation titled View needs protection for one path which describes a solution. The idea is to use @csrf_exempt on the whole view, but when the API client header is not present or invalid, then call a function annotated with @csrf_protect.

Answer 2

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')