How to obtain a plain text Django error page

Question

During development, I am running Django in Debug mode and I am posting data to my application using a text mode application. Ideally, I need to receive a plain text response

Answer 1

This is an improvement on Yuji's answer, which provides a stacktrace, more instructions (for us django newbies) and is simpler.

Put this code in a file somewhere in your application, e.g. PROJECT_ROOT/MAIN_APP/middleware/exceptions.py, and make sure you have an empty __init__.py in the same directory.

import traceback
from django.http import HttpResponse

class PlainExceptionsMiddleware(object):
    def process_exception(self, request, exception):
        return HttpResponse(traceback.format_exc(exception), content_type="text/plain", status=500)

Now edit your settings.py and find MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (. Add another entry so it is like this:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    # (all the previous entries)

    # Plain text exception pages.
    'MAIN_APP.middleware.exceptions.PlainExceptionsMiddleware',
)

Restart django and you are good to go!

User-agent aware formatting.

If you're like me and developing an app and a website both backed by django, you probably want to show plain text error pages to the app, and the nice formatted ones to the browser. A simple way to to that is to check the user agent:

import traceback
from django.http import HttpResponse

class PlainExceptionsMiddleware(object):
    def process_exception(self, request, exception):
        if "HTTP_USER_AGENT" in request.META and "chrome" in request.META["HTTP_USER_AGENT"].lower():
            return
        return HttpResponse(traceback.format_exc(exception), content_type="text/plain", status=500)