How to send CSRF Cookie from React to Django Rest Framework with Axios

Question

I want to make a POST request from a React app using Axios to a Django Rest Framework backend. I have managed to get a CSRF Token from the backend but I can't manage to send it with my request, so I always get a Forbidden (CSRF cookie not set.) error:

This is the code of my React app:

handleClick() {
    const axios = require('axios');
    var csrfCookie = Cookies.get('XSRF-TOKEN');
    console.log(csrfCookie)
    axios.post('http://127.0.0.1:8000/es/api-auth/login/',
      {
        next: '/',
        username: '[email protected]',
        password: 'Cancun10!',
      },
      {
        headers: {
          'x-xsrf-token': csrfCookie,  // <------- Is this the right way to send the cookie?
        },
        withCredentials = true,
      }
    )
    .then(function (response) {
      console.log(response);
    })
    .catch(function (error) {
      console.log(error);
    })
  }

And this is my settings.py CSRF configuration:

CORS_ALLOW_CREDENTIALS = True
CORS_ALLOW_HEADERS = (
    'xsrfheadername',
    'xsrfcookiename',
    'content-type',
    'XSRF-TOKEN',
)

CORS_ORIGIN_WHITELIST = serverconfig.CORS_ORIGIN_WHITELIST
CSRF_TRUSTED_ORIGINS = serverconfig.CSRF_TRUSTED_ORIGINS
CSRF_COOKIE_NAME = "XSRF-TOKEN"

Answer 1

Django uses X-CSRFTOKEN as the csrf header by default, see here. The option CSRF_COOKIE_NAME you use in your Django settings only changes the cookie name, which by default is csrftoken, see here.

To solve your issue, use this header in your axios call: headers: { 'X-CSRFTOKEN': csrfCookie }.

Use the following:

axios.post('http://127.0.0.1:8000/es/api-auth/login/',
    {
        next: '/',
        username: '[email protected]',
        password: 'Cancun10!',
    },
    {
        headers: {
             'X-CSRFTOKEN': csrfCookie,
         },
    },
)

Also, remove XSRF-TOKEN from CORS_ALLOW_HEADERS in your Django settings, and add X-CSRFTOKEN to it instead. If you don't feel like removing XSRF-TOKEN, you can safely add X-CSRFTOKEN to CORS_ALLOW_HEADERS with the following, documentation here

# settings.py

from corsheaders.defaults import default_headers

CORS_ALLOW_HEADERS = list(default_headers) + [
    'X-CSRFTOKEN',
]

Answer 2

Also, it's will be easier if you create an Axios instance

const instance = axios.create({
  baseURL: API_URL,
  withCredentials: true,
  xsrfHeaderName: 'X-CSRFToken',
  xsrfCookieName: 'csrftoken',
})

And make sure xsrfCookieName and CSRF_COOKIE_NAME have the same name. Note that if CSRF_COOKIE_HTTPONLY set to True, client-side JavaScript will not be able to access the CSRF cookie:

# settings.py

CSRF_COOKIE_NAME = "csrftoken"
CSRF_COOKIE_HTTPONLY = False

CORS_EXPOSE_HEADERS = ["Content-Type", "X-CSRFToken"]
CORS_ALLOW_CREDENTIALS = True