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Everything you need to know about Middleware in Django!

Akash Shrivastava

Hey, there fellow Djangomers and Pythonistas,

At ScaleReal we work extensively on Python/Django Applications and have built a lot of highly scalable applications for various clients of ours.

While working on such apps it’s very important to understand the ins and outs of Django’s middleware workings.

So, In this article, we’ll learn about Middleware in Django, why to use them, how it works & how to create custom middleware in Django. So, let’s dive in!

Here’s a list of everything which will be covered in this article:

  1. What is Middleware in Django?

  2. How does Middleware work?

  3. What are the types of Middleware?

  4. How to write a custom Middleware in Django?

  5. Things to remember when using middleware

1. What is Middleware in Django?

In Layman terms 👨‍💼, a Middleware is something which acts as a bridge between two parts of a program or the system that enables communication between them. In technical terms 👨‍💻, Middleware is a framework of hooks into Django’s request/response processing. It’s a light, low-level “plugin” system for globally altering Django’s input or output. Each middleware component is responsible for doing some specific function.

2. How does Middleware work? 🤔

When a user makes a request from your application, a WSGI handler is instantiated, which handles the following things:

  • Imports project’s settings.py file and Django exception classes.
  • Loads all the middleware classes which are written in MIDDLEWARE tuple located in settings.py file
  • Builds list of methods which handle processing of request, view, response & exception.
  • Loops through the request methods in order.
  • Resolves the requested URL
  • Loops through each of the view processing methods
  • Calls the view function
  • Processes exception methods (if any)
  • Loops through each of the response methods in the reverse order from request middleware.
  • Builds a return value and makes a call to the callback function.

Working of Middleware ⬇⬆

3. What are the types of Middleware?

There are two types of Middleware in Django:

  • Built-in Middleware
  • Custom Middleware

Built-in Middleware are provided by default in Django when you create your project. You can check the default Middleware in settings.py file of your project.

Custom Middleware — You can write your own middleware which can be used throughout your project. Let’s see how we can do that!

4. How to write a custom Middleware in Django? ✍

  • Create a python package (a folder with __init__.py inside) named as middleware
  • Create a file named custom_middleware.py (or anything which you like) and a regular Python function / class in it.
  • You can write middleware as a function or as a class whose instances are callable.

Function based Middleware:

Class based Middleware:

Now the final step will be to add your custom middleware in MIDDLEWARE List in settings.py file

All set ✔ Now you can use your custom middleware easily 😁

Further, let’s understand the special methods of class-based middleware:

  • process_request: The request object will be created while Django goes through process_request method in each middleware. After that, it resolves which view to be called soon after the request object is created with the help of ROOT_URLCONF key in settings file.
  • process_view(request, view_func, view_args, view_kwargs): request is the HttpRequest object and view_func is the function that is being called. It will be called just before calling the view.
  • process_response: The response will be the final output Django will process after executing the process_response method in each middleware which will be HttpResponse object.
  • process_template_response(request, response): request is an HttpRequest object. response is the TemplateResponse object (or equivalent) returned by a Django view or by a middleware.
  • process_exception(request, exception): request is an HttpRequest object. exception is an Exception object raised by the view function. This method is called when the view raises an exception.

5. Things to remember when using middleware:

  • Order of middleware is important.
  • A middleware only need to extend from class object.
  • A middleware is free to implement some of the methods and not implement other methods.
  • A middleware may implement process_request but may not implement process_response and process_view.

That’s it from my side devs! 👨‍💻

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed reading this article, please click the 👏 button and share to help others find it! Feel free to leave a comment 💬 below. You can connect with me on GitHub, LinkedIn, Twitter.

Have feedback? Let’s connect here.

~Akash Shrivastava