POST method always return 403 Forbidden
This answer is for people that may encounter this same problem in the future.
The CSRF {{csrf_token}}
template tag that is required for forms in Django prevent against Cross Site Request Forgeries. CSRF makes it possible for a malicious site that has been visited by a client's browser to make requests to your own server. Hence the csrf_token provided by django makes it simple for your django server and site to be protected against this type of malicious attack. If your form is not protected by csrf_token, django returns a 403 forbidden page. This is a form of protection for your website especially when the token wasn't left out intentionally.
But there are scenarios where a django site would not want to protect its forms using the csrf_token. For instance, I developed a USSD application and a view function is required to receive a POST request from the USSD API. We should note that the POST request was not from a form on the client hence the risk of CSRF impossible, since a malicious site cannot submit requests. The POST request is received when a user dials a USSD code and not when a form is submitted.
In other words, there are situations where a function will need to get a POST request and there would not be the need of {{csrf_token}}.
Django provides us with a decorator @csrf_exempt
. This decorator marks a view as being exempt from the protection ensured by the middleware.
from django.views.decorators.csrf import csrf_exempt
from django.http import HttpResponse
@csrf_exempt
def my_view(request):
return HttpResponse('Hello world')
Django also provides another decorator that performs the same function with {{csrf_token}}
, but it doesn't reject incoming request. This decorator is @requires_csrf_token
. For instance:
@requires_csrf_token
def my_view(request):
c = {}
# ...
return render(request, "a_template.html", c)
The last decorator that will be mentioned in this post does exactly the same thing as {{csrf_token}} and it is called @csrf_protect
. However, the use of this decorator by itself is not best practice because you might forget to add it to your views. For instance:
@csrf_protect
def my_view(request):
c = {}
# ...
return render(request, "a_template.html", c)
Below are some links that will guide and explain better.
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/ref/contrib/csrf/#module-django.views.decorators.csrf
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/ref/contrib/csrf/
http://www.squarefree.com/securitytips/web-developers.html#CSRF
I maybe wrong however I found the above solutions rather complex.
what worked for me was simply including my csrf token into my post request.
$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "/reports/",
data: { csrfmiddlewaretoken: "{{ csrf_token }}", // < here
state:"inactive"
},
success: function() {
alert("pocohuntus")
console.log("prototype")
}
})