Settings

Namespaces are one honking great idea - let's do more of those!

— The Zen of Python

Configuration for REST framework is all namespaced inside a single Django setting, named REST_FRAMEWORK.

For example your project's settings.py file might include something like this:

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_RENDERER_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.renderers.YAMLRenderer',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_PARSER_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.parsers.YAMLParser',
    )
}

Accessing settings

If you need to access the values of REST framework's API settings in your project, you should use the api_settings object. For example.

from rest_framework.settings import api_settings

print api_settings.DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES

The api_settings object will check for any user-defined settings, and otherwise fall back to the default values. Any setting that uses string import paths to refer to a class will automatically import and return the referenced class, instead of the string literal.

API Reference

API policy settings

The following settings control the basic API policies, and are applied to every APIView class based view, or @api_view function based view.

DEFAULT_RENDERER_CLASSES

A list or tuple of renderer classes, that determines the default set of renderers that may be used when returning a Response object.

Default:

(
    'rest_framework.renderers.JSONRenderer',
    'rest_framework.renderers.BrowsableAPIRenderer',
)

DEFAULT_PARSER_CLASSES

A list or tuple of parser classes, that determines the default set of parsers used when accessing the request.DATA property.

Default:

(
    'rest_framework.parsers.JSONParser',
    'rest_framework.parsers.FormParser',
    'rest_framework.parsers.MultiPartParser'
)

DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES

A list or tuple of authentication classes, that determines the default set of authenticators used when accessing the request.user or request.auth properties.

Default:

(
    'rest_framework.authentication.SessionAuthentication',
    'rest_framework.authentication.BasicAuthentication'
)

DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES

A list or tuple of permission classes, that determines the default set of permissions checked at the start of a view.

Default:

(
    'rest_framework.permissions.AllowAny',
)

DEFAULT_THROTTLE_CLASSES

A list or tuple of throttle classes, that determines the default set of throttles checked at the start of a view.

Default: ()

DEFAULT_CONTENT_NEGOTIATION_CLASS

A content negotiation class, that determines how a renderer is selected for the response, given an incoming request.

Default: 'rest_framework.negotiation.DefaultContentNegotiation'

Generic view settings

The following settings control the behavior of the generic class based views.

DEFAULT_MODEL_SERIALIZER_CLASS

A class that determines the default type of model serializer that should be used by a generic view if model is specified, but serializer_class is not provided.

Default: 'rest_framework.serializers.ModelSerializer'

DEFAULT_PAGINATION_SERIALIZER_CLASS

A class the determines the default serialization style for paginated responses.

Default: rest_framework.pagination.PaginationSerializer

DEFAULT_FILTER_BACKENDS

A list of filter backend classes that should be used for generic filtering. If set to None then generic filtering is disabled.

PAGINATE_BY

The default page size to use for pagination. If set to None, pagination is disabled by default.

Default: None

PAGINATE_BY_PARAM

The name of a query parameter, which can be used by the client to override the default page size to use for pagination. If set to None, clients may not override the default page size.

For example, given the following settings:

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'PAGINATE_BY': 10,
    'PAGINATE_BY_PARAM': 'page_size',
}

A client would be able to modify the pagination size by using the page_size query parameter. For example:

GET http://example.com/api/accounts?page_size=25

Default: None

MAX_PAGINATE_BY

The maximum page size to allow when the page size is specified by the client. If set to None, then no maximum limit is applied.

For example, given the following settings:

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'PAGINATE_BY': 10,
    'PAGINATE_BY_PARAM': 'page_size',
    'MAX_PAGINATE_BY': 100
}

A client request like the following would return a paginated list of up to 100 items.

GET http://example.com/api/accounts?page_size=999

Default: None

Authentication settings

The following settings control the behavior of unauthenticated requests.

UNAUTHENTICATED_USER

The class that should be used to initialize request.user for unauthenticated requests.

Default: django.contrib.auth.models.AnonymousUser

UNAUTHENTICATED_TOKEN

The class that should be used to initialize request.auth for unauthenticated requests.

Default: None

Test settings

The following settings control the behavior of APIRequestFactory and APIClient

TEST_REQUEST_DEFAULT_FORMAT

The default format that should be used when making test requests.

This should match up with the format of one of the renderer classes in the TEST_REQUEST_RENDERER_CLASSES setting.

Default: 'multipart'

TEST_REQUEST_RENDERER_CLASSES

The renderer classes that are supported when building test requests.

The format of any of these renderer classes may be used when constructing a test request, for example: client.post('/users', {'username': 'jamie'}, format='json')

Default:

(
    'rest_framework.renderers.MultiPartRenderer',
    'rest_framework.renderers.JSONRenderer'
)

Browser overrides

The following settings provide URL or form-based overrides of the default browser behavior.

FORM_METHOD_OVERRIDE

The name of a form field that may be used to override the HTTP method of the form.

If the value of this setting is None then form method overloading will be disabled.

Default: '_method'

FORM_CONTENT_OVERRIDE

The name of a form field that may be used to override the content of the form payload. Must be used together with FORM_CONTENTTYPE_OVERRIDE.

If either setting is None then form content overloading will be disabled.

Default: '_content'

FORM_CONTENTTYPE_OVERRIDE

The name of a form field that may be used to override the content type of the form payload. Must be used together with FORM_CONTENT_OVERRIDE.

If either setting is None then form content overloading will be disabled.

Default: '_content_type'

URL_ACCEPT_OVERRIDE

The name of a URL parameter that may be used to override the HTTP Accept header.

If the value of this setting is None then URL accept overloading will be disabled.

Default: 'accept'

URL_FORMAT_OVERRIDE

The name of a URL parameter that may be used to override the default Accept header based content negotiation.

Default: 'format'

Date and time formatting

The following settings are used to control how date and time representations may be parsed and rendered.

DATETIME_FORMAT

A format string that should be used by default for rendering the output of DateTimeField serializer fields. If None, then DateTimeField serializer fields will return Python datetime objects, and the datetime encoding will be determined by the renderer.

May be any of None, 'iso-8601' or a Python strftime format string.

Default: None

DATETIME_INPUT_FORMATS

A list of format strings that should be used by default for parsing inputs to DateTimeField serializer fields.

May be a list including the string 'iso-8601' or Python strftime format strings.

Default: ['iso-8601']

DATE_FORMAT

A format string that should be used by default for rendering the output of DateField serializer fields. If None, then DateField serializer fields will return Python date objects, and the date encoding will be determined by the renderer.

May be any of None, 'iso-8601' or a Python strftime format string.

Default: None

DATE_INPUT_FORMATS

A list of format strings that should be used by default for parsing inputs to DateField serializer fields.

May be a list including the string 'iso-8601' or Python strftime format strings.

Default: ['iso-8601']

TIME_FORMAT

A format string that should be used by default for rendering the output of TimeField serializer fields. If None, then TimeField serializer fields will return Python time objects, and the time encoding will be determined by the renderer.

May be any of None, 'iso-8601' or a Python strftime format string.

Default: None

TIME_INPUT_FORMATS

A list of format strings that should be used by default for parsing inputs to TimeField serializer fields.

May be a list including the string 'iso-8601' or Python strftime format strings.

Default: ['iso-8601']

View names and descriptions

The following settings are used to generate the view names and descriptions, as used in responses to OPTIONS requests, and as used in the browsable API.

VIEW_NAME_FUNCTION

A string representing the function that should be used when generating view names.

This should be a function with the following signature:

view_name(cls, suffix=None)

cls: The view class. Typically the name function would inspect the name of the class when generating a descriptive name, by accessing cls.__name__.
suffix: The optional suffix used when differentiating individual views in a viewset.

Default: 'rest_framework.views.get_view_name'

VIEW_DESCRIPTION_FUNCTION

A string representing the function that should be used when generating view descriptions.

This setting can be changed to support markup styles other than the default markdown. For example, you can use it to support rst markup in your view docstrings being output in the browsable API.

This should be a function with the following signature:

view_description(cls, html=False)

cls: The view class. Typically the description function would inspect the docstring of the class when generating a description, by accessing cls.__doc__
html: A boolean indicating if HTML output is required. True when used in the browsable API, and False when used in generating OPTIONS responses.

Default: 'rest_framework.views.get_view_description'

Miscellaneous settings

EXCEPTION_HANDLER

A string representing the function that should be used when returning a response for any given exception. If the function returns None, a 500 error will be raised.

This setting can be changed to support error responses other than the default {"detail": "Failure..."} responses. For example, you can use it to provide API responses like {"errors": [{"message": "Failure...", "code": ""} ...]}.

This should be a function with the following signature:

exception_handler(exc)

exc: The exception.

Default: 'rest_framework.views.exception_handler'

URL_FIELD_NAME

A string representing the key that should be used for the URL fields generated by HyperlinkedModelSerializer.

Default: 'url'

FORMAT_SUFFIX_KWARG

The name of a parameter in the URL conf that may be used to provide a format suffix.

Default: 'format'