Making JavaScript Calls from Django Templates to DRF Endpoints

When integrating Django REST Framework (DRF) with a traditional Django template, you can use JavaScript (via the Fetch API or jQuery AJAX) to call your DRF API endpoints. This guide provides step-by-step examples and covers important considerations like CSRF tokens, authentication, relevant settings/middleware, and best practices.

Overview of the Approach

In a typical setup, your Django app renders an HTML template, and that page includes JavaScript which calls DRF endpoints (usually returning JSON). If the page and the DRF API share the same domain and session, you can leverage Django’s session authentication for AJAX calls. If the API is hosted on a different domain or meant for third-party clients, you’ll likely use token-based authentication instead. In either case, you must handle CSRF protection for any “unsafe” HTTP methods (POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE) when making requests from a Django template.

Below, we’ll walk through examples using both the