How to get Request.User in Django-Rest-Framework serializer?

Question

You cannot access the request.user directly. You need to access the request object, and then fetch the user attribute.

Like this:

user =  self.context['request'].user

Or to be more safe,

user = None
request = self.context.get("request")
if request and hasattr(request, "user"):
    user = request.user

More on extra context can be read here

Actually, you don't have to bother with context. There is a much better way to do it:

from rest_framework.fields import CurrentUserDefault

class PostSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):

    class Meta:
        model = Post

   def save(self):
        user = CurrentUserDefault()  # <= magic!
        title = self.validated_data['title']
        article = self.validated_data['article']

As Igor mentioned in other answer, you can use CurrentUserDefault. If you do not want to override save method just for this, then use doc:

from rest_framework import serializers

class PostSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    user = serializers.PrimaryKeyRelatedField(read_only=True, default=serializers.CurrentUserDefault())
    class Meta:
        model = Post

You can pass request.user when calling .save(...) inside a view:

class EventSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):

    class Meta:
        model = models.Event
        exclude = ['user']


class EventView(APIView):

    def post(self, request):
        es = EventSerializer(data=request.data)
        if es.is_valid():
            es.save(user=self.request.user)
            return Response(status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED)
        return Response(data=es.errors, status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

This is the model:

class Event(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(to=settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    date = models.DateTimeField(default=timezone.now)
    place = models.CharField(max_length=255)

CurrentUserDefault A default class that can be used to represent the current user. In order to use this, the 'request' must have been provided as part of the context dictionary when instantiating the serializer.

in views.py

serializer = UploadFilesSerializer(data=request.data, context={'request': request})

This is example to pass request

in serializers.py

owner = serializers.HiddenField(
    default=serializers.CurrentUserDefault()
)

Source From Rest Framework