Why Django Middleware is so darn cool

Django is great for a bunch of reasons, one of the coolest is the built in middleware for security, sessions and a bunch of other nifty stuff. The cool stuff happens when you write your own Django middleware.

Django processes requests in a very logical order

And it’s even cooler when you add your own layer in there, and it’s not even that hard (even though the docs make it looks complicated). I made a pretty nifty one to log requests/responses.

class RequestLogging(object):

     def process_request(self, request):
        '''
        Log the meta data of an incoming request
        '''
        meta_data = request.__dict__.get('META')
        print(meta_data)
     
    def process_response(self, request, response):
        '''
        Log the outgoing response
        '''
        print(response)
        return response

And that’s all there is. The only thing left to do is hook it up in the middleware in the settings.

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = [
 ‘django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware’,
 ‘django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware’,
 ‘django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware’,
 ‘django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware’,
 ‘django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware’,
 ‘django.contrib.auth.middleware.SessionAuthenticationMiddleware’,
 ‘django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware’,
 ‘django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware’,
 ‘myApp.LoggingMiddleware.RequestLogging’, 
 #LoggingMiddleware is the name of the file RequestLogging is in
]

If you want to add some logic to validate sessions, or append a response id to your data then you can easily and simply add that to your middleware. There’s no limit to the cool stuff you can do.