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.JSONRenderer',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_PARSER_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.parsers.JSONParser',
    )
}

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. Permission must be granted by every class in the list.

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'

DEFAULT_SCHEMA_CLASS

A view inspector class that will be used for schema generation.

Default: 'rest_framework.schemas.AutoSchema'

Generic view settings

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

DEFAULT_PAGINATION_SERIALIZER_CLASS

This setting has been removed.

The pagination API does not use serializers to determine the output format, and you'll need to instead override the `get_paginated_response method on a pagination class in order to specify how the output format is controlled.

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

This setting has been removed.

See the pagination documentation for further guidance on setting the pagination style.

PAGE_SIZE

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

Default: None

PAGINATE_BY_PARAM

This setting has been removed.

See the pagination documentation for further guidance on setting the pagination style.

MAX_PAGINATE_BY

This setting has been removed.

See the pagination documentation for further guidance on setting the pagination style.

SEARCH_PARAM

The name of a query parameter, which can be used to specify the search term used by SearchFilter.

Default: search

ORDERING_PARAM

The name of a query parameter, which can be used to specify the ordering of results returned by OrderingFilter.

Default: ordering

Versioning settings

DEFAULT_VERSION

The value that should be used for request.version when no versioning information is present.

Default: None

ALLOWED_VERSIONS

If set, this value will restrict the set of versions that may be returned by the versioning scheme, and will raise an error if the provided version if not in this set.

Default: None

VERSION_PARAM

The string that should used for any versioning parameters, such as in the media type or URL query parameters.

Default: 'version'

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. (If removing authentication entirely, e.g. by removing django.contrib.auth from INSTALLED_APPS, set UNAUTHENTICATED_USER to None.)

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'
)

Schema generation controls

SCHEMA_COERCE_PATH_PK

If set, this maps the 'pk' identifier in the URL conf onto the actual field name when generating a schema path parameter. Typically this will be 'id'. This gives a more suitable representation as "primary key" is an implementation detail, whereas "identifier" is a more general concept.

Default: True

SCHEMA_COERCE_METHOD_NAMES

If set, this is used to map internal viewset method names onto external action names used in the schema generation. This allows us to generate names that are more suitable for an external representation than those that are used internally in the codebase.

Default: {'retrieve': 'read', 'destroy': 'delete'}

Content type controls

URL_FORMAT_OVERRIDE

The name of a URL parameter that may be used to override the default content negotiation Accept header behavior, by using a format=… query parameter in the request URL.

For example: http://example.com/organizations/?format=csv

If the value of this setting is None then URL format overrides will be disabled.

Default: 'format'

FORMAT_SUFFIX_KWARG

The name of a parameter in the URL conf that may be used to provide a format suffix. This setting is applied when using format_suffix_patterns to include suffixed URL patterns.

For example: http://example.com/organizations.csv/

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: 'iso-8601'

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: 'iso-8601'

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: 'iso-8601'

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']

Encodings

UNICODE_JSON

When set to True, JSON responses will allow unicode characters in responses. For example:

{"unicode black star":"★"}

When set to False, JSON responses will escape non-ascii characters, like so:

{"unicode black star":"\u2605"}

Both styles conform to RFC 4627, and are syntactically valid JSON. The unicode style is preferred as being more user-friendly when inspecting API responses.

Default: True

COMPACT_JSON

When set to True, JSON responses will return compact representations, with no spacing after ':' and ',' characters. For example:

{"is_admin":false,"email":"jane@example"}

When set to False, JSON responses will return slightly more verbose representations, like so:

{"is_admin": false, "email": "jane@example"}

The default style is to return minified responses, in line with Heroku's API design guidelines.

Default: True

STRICT_JSON

When set to True, JSON rendering and parsing will only observe syntactically valid JSON, raising an exception for the extended float values (nan, inf, -inf) accepted by Python's json module. This is the recommended setting, as these values are not generally supported. e.g., neither Javascript's JSON.Parse nor PostgreSQL's JSON data type accept these values.

When set to False, JSON rendering and parsing will be permissive. However, these values are still invalid and will need to be specially handled in your code.

Default: True

COERCE_DECIMAL_TO_STRING

When returning decimal objects in API representations that do not support a native decimal type, it is normally best to return the value as a string. This avoids the loss of precision that occurs with binary floating point implementations.

When set to True, the serializer DecimalField class will return strings instead of Decimal objects. When set to False, serializers will return Decimal objects, which the default JSON encoder will return as floats.

Default: True

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(self)

self: The view instance. Typically the name function would inspect the name of the class when generating a descriptive name, by accessing self.__class__.__name__.

If the view instance inherits ViewSet, it may have been initialized with several optional arguments:

name: A name expliticly provided to a view in the viewset. Typically, this value should be used as-is when provided.
suffix: Text used when differentiating individual views in a viewset. This argument is mutually exclusive to name.
detail: Boolean that differentiates an individual view in a viewset as either being a 'list' or 'detail' view.

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(self, html=False)

self: The view instance. Typically the description function would inspect the docstring of the class when generating a description, by accessing self.__class__.__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.

If the view instance inherits ViewSet, it may have been initialized with several optional arguments:

description: A description explicitly provided to the view in the viewset. Typically, this is set by extra viewset actions, and should be used as-is.

Default: 'rest_framework.views.get_view_description'

HTML Select Field cutoffs

Global settings for select field cutoffs for rendering relational fields in the browsable API.

HTML_SELECT_CUTOFF

Global setting for the html_cutoff value. Must be an integer.

Default: 1000

HTML_SELECT_CUTOFF_TEXT

A string representing a global setting for html_cutoff_text.

Default: "More than {count} items..."

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, context)

exc: The exception.

Default: 'rest_framework.views.exception_handler'

NON_FIELD_ERRORS_KEY

A string representing the key that should be used for serializer errors that do not refer to a specific field, but are instead general errors.

Default: 'non_field_errors'

URL_FIELD_NAME

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

Default: 'url'

NUM_PROXIES

An integer of 0 or more, that may be used to specify the number of application proxies that the API runs behind. This allows throttling to more accurately identify client IP addresses. If set to None then less strict IP matching will be used by the throttle classes.

Default: None