Demystifying Django API Packages: DRF, Docs, CORS, and Rate Limiting
While working on a project, I got to use these packages in different ways. I learned some common pitfalls developers can fall into and had a few “aha” moments that I wanted to share in this post.
Django Rest Framework
It’s a Django add-on that helps build REST APIs, endpoints, and serializers. It takes care of a lot of the headaches when developing APIs for apps.
This package relies on a few key pieces to make those APIs work:
- Endpoints: These are the routes people use to hit your API (like
example.com/api/posts). - Serializers: They act as tools to convert your model data into JSON format that’s ready to send back in responses.
- Models: These are Django’s way of representing database tables, so you don’t have to mess with raw SQL. DRF builds on them for API stuff.
API Documentation via Swagger UI & Redoc
Using the drf_spectacular package, I was able to auto-generate docs for my APIs and their endpoints.
Once you install drf_spectacular and add it to settings.py, then set DEFAULT_SCHEMA_CLASS: drf_spectacular.openapi.AutoSchema, it handles creating interactive docs. For example, it sets up pages at /docs/ for Swagger UI and /redoc/ for Redoc. It pulls info straight from your views and serializers, like showing the JSON layout for a search endpoint or what query params to use, such as ?term=…
Cross-Origin Reasource Sharing (CORS)
Browsers have built-in security that can block requests to your API from other sites.
The corsheaders package sorts out the settings needed so browsers don’t block those cross-origin requests. It lets your API work with frontends on different domains.
Just remember, if you set it too open (like allowing everything), it could lead to security issues in production. That’s fine for a quick MVP, though.
Rate Limiting
Rate limiting is about controlling how often someone can ping your API to stop overloads, DDoS attacks, or people hogging resources. The ratelimit package gives you easy decorators or middleware for Django. It’s common in public APIs like Twitter or GitHub to keep things fair and protect performance.
You can set it up with something like @ratelimit(key=‘ip’, rate=‘60/m’, block=True) on your views, say for a random joke endpoint or search function. That limits each IP to 60 hits per minute.
Conclusion
This was a quick rundown of these four topics you might run into when building APIs with Django.
Thanks for reading.