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!

• 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

$ pip install ddrr

# in settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # ...
    "ddrr",
)

import ddrr
ddrr.quick_setup()

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

ddrr.quick_setup accepts the following optional arguments:

• enable_requests - (default: True) Enable request logging.
• enable_responses - (default: True) Enable response logging.
• level - (default: DEBUG) The level of the log messages.
• pretty - (default: False) Enable pretty-printing of bodies.
• request_template - (default: None) Request template string
• request_template_name - (default: None) Request template name
• response_template - (default: None) Response template string
• response_template_name - (default: None) Response template name
• limit_body - (default: None) Limit request and response body length
• colors - (default: True) Enable color support if terminal supports it

Change output formats

You can pass request_template or request_template_name to quick_setup to define a different output format for request logs. The same goes for responses, use response_template or response_template_name.

The templates are normal Django templates which are passed the necessary template context with access to pretty much anything you could be interested in.

• 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.quick_setup(
    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. Pass pretty=True to quick_setup to enable it.

Pretty-printing of JSON requires not 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, ElasticSearch, or anything else.

Similar projects

• Django Debug Toolbar

Development and contributions

PR's are always welcome!

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

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

Install dependencies and set up the pre-commit hooks.

$ poetry install
$ pre-commit install

The pre-commit hooks will, among other things, run Flake8 on the code base and Black to make sure the code style is consistent across all files. Check out .pre-commit-config.yaml for details.