django ajax proxy view

Question

A django web app needs to make ajax calls to an external url. In development I serve directly from django so I have a cross domain problem. What is the django way to write a proxy for the ajax call?

Answer 1

Here's a dead simple proxy implementation for Django.

from django.http import HttpResponse
import mimetypes
import urllib2

def proxy_to(request, path, target_url):
    url = '%s%s' % (target_url, path)
    if request.META.has_key('QUERY_STRING'):
        url += '?' + request.META['QUERY_STRING']
    try:
        proxied_request = urllib2.urlopen(url)
        status_code = proxied_request.code
        mimetype = proxied_request.headers.typeheader or mimetypes.guess_type(url)
        content = proxied_request.read()
    except urllib2.HTTPError as e:
        return HttpResponse(e.msg, status=e.code, mimetype='text/plain')
    else:
        return HttpResponse(content, status=status_code, mimetype=mimetype)

This proxies requests from PROXY_PATH+path to TARGET_URL+path. The proxy is enabled and configured by adding a URL pattern like this to urls.py:

url(r'^PROXY_PATH/(?P<path>.*)$', proxy_to, {'target_url': 'TARGET_URL'}),

For example:

url(r'^images/(?P<path>.*)$', proxy_to, {'target_url': 'http://imageserver.com/'}),

will make a request to http://localhost:8000/images/logo.png fetch and return the file at http://imageserver.com/logo.png.

Query strings are forwarded, while HTTP headers such as cookies and POST data are not (it's quite easy to add that if you need it).

Note: This is mainly intended for development use. The proper way to handle proxying in production is with the HTTP server (e.g. Apache or Nginx).