Return the current user with Django Rest Framework

Question

I am currently developing an API using Django.

However, I would like to create a view that returns the current User with the following endpoint: /users/current/.

To do so, I created a list view and filtered the queryset on the user that made the request. That works, but the result is a list, not a single object. Combined with pagination, the result looks way too complicated and inconsistent compared to other endpoints.

I also tried to create a detail view and filtering the queryset, but DRF complains that I provided no pk or slug.

Do you have any idea?

Answer 1

With something like this you're probably best off breaking out of the generic views and writing the view yourself.

@api_view(['GET']) def current_user(request):     serializer = UserSerializer(request.user)     return Response(serializer.data) 

You could also do the same thing using a class based view like so...

class CurrentUserView(APIView):     def get(self, request):         serializer = UserSerializer(request.user)         return Response(serializer.data) 

Of course, there's also no requirement that you use a serializer, you could equally well just pull out the fields you need from the user instance.

@api_view(['GET']) def current_user(request):     user = request.user     return Response({         'username': user.username,         'email': user.email,         ...     }) 

Hope that helps.