In Django, how can I generate csrf token when not using templates

Question

I'm writing pages in my own code, not using Django templates. Because I'm overloaded on new things to learn and trying to get this done.

Now I had some easy cases with templates, and {% csrf_token %} worked just fine. But they used render() and a template.

I have a bunch of custom HTML I can't immediately figure out how to put in a template, so I can't use render(). Instead, I return HttpResponse() applied to my page, and that does not deal with {% csrf_token %}.

How do I get that <input> element into the form part of my page? I'm willing to generate the form from a template, but not the rest of the page.

Answer 1

You can get the CSRF token outside of a Django template by calling the appropriate function from the CSRF middleware:

from django.middleware.csrf import get_token

def your_view(request):
    csrf_token = get_token(request)
    csrf_token_html = '<input type="hidden" name="csrfmiddlewaretoken" value="{}" />'.format(csrf_token)

One thing to keep in mind is that Django templates don't really care about what you pass into them. They only touch content between {% ... %} and {{ ... }} tags. If your template is just static HTML, the Django template engine will not touch it at all and it'll be as if you served it as a normal file.