Custom HTTP Header in Django

Question

I use a custom http header for URL signature just called "sign", how to get such custom HTTP header value in Django?

score 83 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 17 '19 at 14:09

Go ahead and use:

request.META.get('HTTP_{your uppercased header name}')

Note in Django you write the header name in capitals with underscores instead of dashes, but in the request on the client you must write it using dashes instead of underscores (production web servers will strip out custom headers with underscores in them for security reasons).

So, a custom header My-Custom-Header is accessed request.META['HTTP_MY_CUSTOM_HEADER']

score 17 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 17 '13 at 10:47

17

Finally I found just get it through

request.META('HTTP_{your uppercased header name}')

answered Jan 17 '13 at 10:47

Jason Xu

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Thanks for the helpful pointer. Besides uppercasing the header name, I had to replace dashes with underscores. So, header name "My-custom-header" is request.META['HTTP_MY_CUSTOM_HEADER'] – Raj Jan 28 '14 at 07:41
This code gives the following error `TypeError: 'dict' object is not callable`. Calling `request.META.get('HTTP_{your uppercased header name}')` is the correct way. – justin Feb 02 '21 at 00:00

score 16 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 17 '13 at 10:39

You can add your own custom headers to a response like so: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/request-response/#setting-headers

>>> response = HttpResponse()
>>> response['Cache-Control'] = 'no-cache'
>>> del response['Cache-Control']

Or use a decorator to add them to a view: http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/275/

score 8 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 24 '16 at 10:06

8

I was trying to access the header with the above answers, using this code:

request.META.get('HTTP_{your uppercased header name}')

But It didn't work for me, and then I realized that the custom header should not contain underscore so I changed the underscore with dash and boom, everything started working. Hope this will help people like me. :-)

answered Sep 24 '16 at 10:06

Rohit Khatri

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It's not my case but I believe your comment is useful. – Võ Quang Hòa Aug 21 '18 at 07:10

score 6 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 15 '19 at 09:07

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As of Django 2.2 you can use the HttpRequest.headers dictionary which provides case-insensitive dictionary of request headers, like such:

my_header = request.headers.get('x-my-custom-header')

See django.http.HttpRequest.headers

answered Aug 15 '19 at 09:07

jlapoutre

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How would you set the header this way? – alias51 Jan 10 '20 at 21:25

score 3 · Answer 6 · answered Oct 17 '18 at 17:52

From the Django documentation:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/ref/request-response/#django.http.HttpRequest.META

With the exception of CONTENT_LENGTH and CONTENT_TYPE, as given above, any HTTP headers in the request are converted to META keys by converting all characters to uppercase, replacing any hyphens with underscores and adding an HTTP_ prefix to the name. So, for example, a header called X-Bender would be mapped to the META key HTTP_X_BENDER.

Custom HTTP Header in Django

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