> It is a profoundly erroneous truism... that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
API may stand for Application *Programming* Interface, but humans have to be able to read the APIs, too; someone has to do the programming. Django REST Framework supports generating human-friendly HTML output for each resource when the `HTML` format is requested. These pages allow for easy browsing of resources, as well as forms for submitting data to the resources using `POST`, `PUT`, and `DELETE`.
If you include fully-qualified URLs in your resource output, they will be 'urlized' and made clickable for easy browsing by humans. The `rest_framework` package includes a [`reverse`][drfreverse] helper for this purpose.
By default, the API will return the format specified by the headers, which in the case of the browser is HTML. The format can be specified using `?format=` in the request, so you can look at the raw JSON response in a browser by adding `?format=json` to the URL. There are helpful extensions for viewing JSON in [Firefox][ffjsonview] and [Chrome][chromejsonview].
To quickly add authentication to the browesable api, add a routes named `"login"` and `"logout"` under the namespace `"rest_framework"`. DRF provides default routes for this which you can add to your urlconf:
To replace the default theme, add a `bootstrap_theme` block to your `api.html` and insert a `link` to the desired Bootstrap theme css file. This will completely replace the included theme.
Suitable pre-made replacement themes are available at [Bootswatch][bswatch]. To use any of the Bootswatch themes, simply download the theme's `bootstrap.min.css` file, add it to your project, and replace the default one as described above. Make sure that the Bootstrap version of the new theme matches that of the default theme.
You can also change the navbar variant, which by default is `navbar-inverse`, using the `bootstrap_navbar_variant` block. The empty `{% block bootstrap_navbar_variant %}{% endblock %}` will use the original Bootstrap navbar style.
You can use a third party package for customization, rather than doing it by yourself. Here is 2 packages for customizing the API:
* [rest-framework-redesign][rest-framework-redesign] - A package for customizing the API using Bootstrap 5. Modern and sleek design, it comes with the support for dark mode.
* [rest-framework-material][rest-framework-material] - Material design for Django REST Framework.
*`breadcrumbs` - Links showing resource nesting, allowing the user to go back up the resources. It's recommended to preserve these, but they can be overridden using the breadcrumbs block.
*`userlinks` - This is a list of links on the right of the header, by default containing login/logout links. To add links instead of replace, use `{{ block.super }}` to preserve the authentication links.
The browsable API makes use of the Bootstrap tooltips component. Any element with the `js-tooltip` class and a `title` attribute has that title content will display a tooltip on hover events.
To add branding and customize the look-and-feel of the login template, create a template called `login.html` and add it to your project, eg: `templates/rest_framework/login.html`. The template should extend from `rest_framework/login_base.html`.
For more advanced customization, such as not having a Bootstrap basis or tighter integration with the rest of your site, you can simply choose not to have `api.html` extend `base.html`. Then the page content and capabilities are entirely up to you.
When a relationship or `ChoiceField` has too many items, rendering the widget containing all the options can become very slow, and cause the browsable API rendering to perform poorly.
An alternative, but more complex option would be to replace the input with an autocomplete widget, that only loads and renders a subset of the available options as needed. If you need to do this you'll need to do some work to build a custom autocomplete HTML template yourself.
There are [a variety of packages for autocomplete widgets][autocomplete-packages], such as [django-autocomplete-light][django-autocomplete-light], that you may want to refer to. Note that you will not be able to simply include these components as standard widgets, but will need to write the HTML template explicitly. This is because REST framework 3.0 no longer supports the `widget` keyword argument since it now uses templated HTML generation.
