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

Building off of Timmmm's answer, I had to make several modifications for it to work in Django 3.1:

Create a file somewhere in your application, such as YOUR_APP_NAME/middleware/exceptions.py and paste the following code:

import traceback
from django.http import HttpResponse, HttpRequest

class PlainExceptionsMiddleware:
    def __init__(self, get_response):
        self.get_response = get_response

    def __call__(self, request):
        return self.get_response(request)

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

It is not necessary to create an __init__.py file in the middleware folder.

In settings.py, add the following item to the end of the MIDDLEWARE variable, so that it looks like:

MIDDLEWARE = [
    # ...
    'YOUR_APP_NAME.middleware.exceptions.PlainExceptionsMiddleware'
]

Now, if "HTTP_USER_AGENT" and "chrome" are in the request header, this middleware doesn't do anything, so Django returns an HTML response as usual. Otherwise, it returns a plain-text representation of the error as a response (e.g., ValueError("Field 'id' expected a number but got 'undefined'.")) and prints out the traceback to the Django console, as Django normally would. Of course, you can instead return the full traceback as your response.