python - How to obtain a plain text Django error page

Question

During development, I am running Django in Debug mode and I am posting data to my application using a text mode application. Ideally, I need to receive a plain text response when I get an http error code 500 so I don't have to look for the real error inside all that HTML and Javascript.

Is it possible to obtain a Django 500 Internal Server Error as plain text?

Answer 1

If you are looking for a way to get a plain text error page when using curl, you need to add the HTTP header X-Requested-With with value XMLHttpRequest, e.g.

curl -H 'X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest' http://example.com/some/url/

Explanation: this is because Django uses the is_ajax method to determine whether or not to return as plain text or as HTML. is_ajax in turn looks at X-Requested-With.

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Update

Since django version 3.1, error reporting ignores the X-Requested-With header. Instead, set the Accept header on the request to any valid value which does not include the text/html mime type.

e.g.

curl -H 'Accept: application/json;charset=utf-8' http://example.comp/some/url