The Browsable API

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.

— Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

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.

URLs

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 helper for this purpose.

Formats

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 and Chrome.

Customizing

To customize the look-and-feel, create a template called api.html and add it to your project, eg: templates/rest_framework/api.html, that extends the rest_framework/base.html template.

The included browsable API template is built with Bootstrap (2.1.1), making it easy to customize the look-and-feel.

Theme

To replace the theme wholesale, 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.

{% block bootstrap_theme %}
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/my/bootstrap.css" type="text/css">
{% endblock %}

A suitable replacement theme can be generated using Bootstrap's Customize Tool. Also, there are pre-made themes available at Bootswatch. 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.

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.

Full Example

{% extends "rest_framework/base.html" %}

{% block bootstrap_theme %}
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/yourtheme/bootstrap.min.css' type="text/css">
{% endblock %}

{% block bootstrap_navbar_variant %}{% endblock %}

For more specific CSS tweaks, use the style block instead.

Blocks

All of the blocks available in the browsable API base template that can be used in your api.html.

bodyclass - (empty) class attribute for the <body>
bootstrap_theme - CSS for the Bootstrap theme
bootstrap_navbar_variant - CSS class for the navbar
branding - section of the navbar, see Bootstrap components
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.
footer - Any copyright notices or similar footer materials can go here (by default right-aligned)
style - CSS stylesheets for the page
title - title of the page
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.

Components

All of the Bootstrap components are available.

Tooltips

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 displayed in a tooltip on hover after a 1000ms delay.

To add branding and customize the look-and-feel of the auth login template, create a template called login.html and add it to your project, eg: templates/rest_framework/login.html, that extends the rest_framework/base_login.html template.

You can add your site name or branding by including the branding block:

{% block branding %}
    <h3 style="margin: 0 0 20px;">My Site Name</h3>
{% endblock %}

You can also customize the style by adding the bootstrap_theme or style block similar to api.html.

Advanced Customization

Context

The context that's available to the template:

allowed_methods : A list of methods allowed by the resource
api_settings : The API settings
available_formats : A list of formats allowed by the resource
breadcrumblist : The list of links following the chain of nested resources
content : The content of the API response
description : The description of the resource, generated from its docstring
name : The name of the resource
post_form : A form instance for use by the POST form (if allowed)
put_form : A form instance for use by the PUT form (if allowed)
request : The request object
response : The response object
version : The version of Django REST Framework
view : The view handling the request
FORMAT_PARAM : The view can accept a format override
METHOD_PARAM : The view can accept a method override

Not using 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.

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