I want to create a many-to-many relationship where one person can be in many clubs and one club can have many persons. I added the models.py and
You're getting this error as the HyperlinkedIdentityField expects to receive request in context of the serializer so it can build absolute URLs. As you are initializing your serializer on the command line, you don't have access to request and so receive an error.
If you need to check your serializer on the command line, you'd need to do something like this:
from rest_framework.request import Request
from rest_framework.test import APIRequestFactory
from .models import Person
from .serializers import PersonSerializer
factory = APIRequestFactory()
request = factory.get('/')
serializer_context = {
'request': Request(request),
}
p = Person.objects.first()
s = PersonSerializer(instance=p, context=serializer_context)
print s.data
Your url field would look something like http://testserver/person/1/.