Django Debug Requests & Responses (DDRR)

Get more out of your runserver development output! Print request and response headers, body (with pretty-printing), etc. Highly customizable! Supports Django 3.2-4.1 with Python 3.8-3.11.

• Full request headers
• The entire request body
• Pretty-printing optional
• Colored output
• Super easy setup
• No extra dependencies

DDRR can also be used for general logging with some configuration of your own.

Installation

1. $ pip install ddrr

2. Add "ddrr" to INSTALLED_APPS

3. Insert "ddrr.middleware.DebugRequestsResponses" first in MIDDLEWARE

Done! When you run runserver, you'll now get the entire HTTP requests and responses, including headers and bodies.

If you don't like the default output format, read on...

Customization

import logging
DDRR = {
    "ENABLE_REQUESTS": True,  # enable request logging
    "ENABLE_RESPONSES": True,  # enable response logging
    "LEVEL": "DEBUG",  # ddrr log level
    "PRETTY_PRINT": False,  # pretty-print JSON and XML
    "REQUEST_TEMPLATE_NAME": "ddrr/default-request.html",  # request log template name
    "REQUEST_TEMPLATE": None,  # request log template string (overrides template name)
    "RESPONSE_TEMPLATE_NAME": "ddrr/default-response.html",  # response log template name
    "RESPONSE_TEMPLATE": None,  # response log template string (overrides template name)
    "REQUEST_HANDLER": logging.StreamHandler(),  # request log handler
    "RESPONSE_HANDLER": logging.StreamHandler(),  # response log handler
    "ENABLE_COLORS": True,  # enable colors if terminal supports it
    "LIMIT_BODY": None,  # limit request/response body output to X chars
    "DISABLE_DJANGO_SERVER_LOG": False,  # disable default django server log
}

Template contexts

If you want to customize request or response templates, you can use the following values:

• Request template context:
  • ddrr.body - request body
  • ddrr.content_type - request content type
  • ddrr.formatter - the formatter
  • ddrr.headers - mapping of header fields and values
  • ddrr.method - request method
  • ddrr.path - request path
  • ddrr.query_params - query parameters
  • ddrr.query_string - query string
  • ddrr.record - the actual log record object
  • ddrr.request - the actual request object
• Response template context:
  • ddrr.content - response content
  • ddrr.content_type - response content type
  • ddrr.formatter - the formatter
  • ddrr.headers - mapping of header fields and values
  • ddrr.reason_phrase - response reason phrase
  • ddrr.record - the actual log record object
  • ddrr.response - the actual response object
  • ddrr.status_code - response status code

For example, this will log the method, path and body of each request, as well as the status code, reason phrase and content of each response:

DDRR = {
    "REQUEST_TEMPLATE": "{{ ddrr.method }} {{ ddrr.path }}\n"
                        "{{ ddrr.body }}",
    "RESPONSE_TEMPLATE": "{{ ddrr.status_code }} {{ ddrr.reason_phrase }}\n"
                         "{{ ddrr.content }}",
}

Pretty-printing

By default, pretty-printing is disabled. Set DDRR["PRETTY_PRINT"] to True to enable it.

Pretty-printing of JSON requires no external dependency.

Pretty-printing of XML uses minidom by default and doesn't require any extra dependency. If you want to use lxml instead, which is slightly better at pretty-printing XML, you can install that using pip install ddrr[xml].

How it works internally

The middleware ddrr.middleware.DebugRequestsResponses sends the entire request object as the message to ddrr-request-logger. This logger has been configured to use ddrr.formatters.DjangoTemplateRequestFormatter which internally uses Django's built-in template engine to format the request into human-readable form. By default, this is shown in your console output, but you can easily configure it to log it to a file, Logstash, or anything else.

Similar projects

• Django Debug Toolbar

Development and contributions

PRs are always welcome!

For hacking on DDRR, make sure you are familiar with:

• Black
• Flake8
• Poetry
• pre-commit
• pytest

Set up environment

Install project dependencies using Poetry, then install the pre-commit hooks.

$ poetry shell
(.venv) $ poetry install --all-extras --with=dev,test
(.venv) $ pre-commit install

The pre-commit hooks will, among other things, run Flake8 on the code, and format everything with Black. The full pre-commit configuration exists in .pre-commit-config.yaml.

Running tests

Run tests using the current Python interpreter and currently installed Django version.

(.venv) $ pytest

Run tests with every supported Python and Django combination:

(.venv) $ tox

Running GitHub Actions locally

Use act.

$ act

If you are running macOS, you may need to use:

$ act --container-architecture linux/amd64