PYTHON

django post request 403 forbidden

This answer is for people that may encounter this same problem in the future.

The CSRF {{csrf_token}} template tag that is required for forms in Django prevent against Cross Site Request Forgeries. CSRF makes it possible for a malicious site that has been visited by a client's browser to make requests to your own server. Hence the csrf_token provided by django makes it simple for your django server and site to be protected against this type of malicious attack. If your form is not protected by csrf_token, django returns a 403 forbidden page. This is a form of protection for your website especially when the token wasn't left out intentionally.

But there are scenarios where a django site would not want to protect its forms using the csrf_token. For instance, I developed a USSD application and a view function is required to receive a POST request from the USSD API. We should note that the POST request was not from a form on the client hence the risk of CSRF impossible, since a malicious site cannot submit requests. The POST request is received when a user dials a USSD code and not when a form is submitted.

In other words, there are situations where a function will need to get a POST request and there would not be the need of {{csrf_token}}.

Django provides us with a decorator @csrf_exempt. This decorator marks a view as being exempt from the protection ensured by the middleware.


from django.views.decorators.csrf import csrf_exempt
from django.http import HttpResponse

@csrf_exempt
def my_view(request):
    return HttpResponse('Hello world')