Add a require_safe decorator for views to accept GET or HEAD

[Aymeric Augustin]

It is a good practice to reject POST requests on views that are not intended to process them. Django provides the require_GET decorator for this purpose.

Although browsers only implement GET and POST methods, other software such as link checkers uses HEAD requests. Views protected by require_GET will (obviously) reject such requests with "405 Method Not Allowed". I've encountered the problem with the "Check My Links" extension for Google Chrome.

However, RFC2616 says that "The HEAD method is identical to GET except that the server MUST NOT return a message-body in the response." Django already enforces this behavior by stripping the body of the responses to HEAD requests. So I think that in most cases, it makes more sense to accept GET and HEAD than only GET.

That is why I'm proposing a "require_safe" decorator for this purpose.

[Julien Phalip]

The patch looks good but needs a few improvements. The doc should explain why the decorator is called require_safe (i.e. GET and HEAD methods are commonly referred to as "safe" methods), and the tests should actually check that the decorator actually only allows GET and HEAD requests.

[Aymeric Augustin]

Thanks for accepting the feature, julien. Here is a new patch with more details in the documentation and more tests.

[Julien Phalip]

Tweaked doc

[Julien Phalip]

Great work, thank you. I've just made a few minor improvements to the doc.

[Jannis Leidel]

In [16115]:

(The changeset message doesn't reference this ticket)