Get HTTP Request like transfered over the wire (Django) - django

Question

Is it possible to get the http request as bytestring like it gets transferred over the wire if you have a django request object?
Of course the plain text (not encrypted if https gets used).
I would like to store the bytestring to analyze it later.
At best I would like to access the real bytestring. Creating a bytestring from request.META, request.GET and friends will likely not be the same like the original.
Update: it seems that it is impossible to get to the original bytes. Then the question is: how to construct a bytestring which roughly looks like the original?

Answer 1

As others pointed out it is not possible because Django doesn't interact with raw requests.
You could just try reconstructing the request like this.
def reconstruct_request(request):
headers = ''
for header, value in request.META.items():
if not header.startswith('HTTP'):
continue
header = '-'.join([h.capitalize() for h in header[5:].lower().split('_')])
headers += '{}: {}\n'.format(header, value)
return (
'{method} HTTP/1.1\n'
'Content-Length: {content_length}\n'
'Content-Type: {content_type}\n'
'{headers}\n\n'
'{body}'
).format(
method=request.method,
content_length=request.META['CONTENT_LENGTH'],
content_type=request.META['CONTENT_TYPE'],
headers=headers,
body=request.body,
)
NOTE this is not a complete example only proof of concept

Answer 2

The basic answer is no, Django doesn't have access to the raw request, in fact it doesn't even have code to parse raw HTTP request.
This is because Django's (like many other Python web frameworks) HTTP request/response handling is, in it's core, a WSGI application (WSGI specification).
It's the job of the frontend/proxy server (like Apache or nginx) and application server (like uWSGI or gunicorn) to "massage" the request (like transforming and stripping headers) and convert it into an object that can be handled by Django.
As an experiment you can actually wrap Django's WSGI application yourself and see what Django gets to work with when a request comes in.
Edit your project's wsgi.py and add some extremely basic WSGI "middleware":
import os
from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'project.settings')
class MyMiddleware:
def __init__(self, app):
self._app = app
def __call__(self, environ, start_response):
import pdb; pdb.set_trace()
return self._app(environ, start_response)
# Wrap Django's WSGI application
application = MyMiddleware(get_wsgi_application())
Now if you start your devserver (./manage.py runserver) and send a request to your Django application. You'll drop into a debugger.
The only thing of interest here is the environ dict. Poke around it and you'll see that it's pretty much the same as what you'll find in Django's request.META. (The contents of the environ dict is detailed in this section of the WSGI spec.)
Knowing this, the best thing you can get is piecing together items form the environ dict to something that remotely resembles an HTTP request.
But why? If you have an environ dict, you have all the information you need to replicate a Django request. There's no actual need to translate this back to a HTTP request.
In fact, as you now known, you don't need a HTTP request at all to call Django's WSGI application. All you need is a environ dict with the required keys and a callable so that Django can relay the response.
So, to analyze requests (and even be able to replay them) you only need to be able to recreate a valid environ dict.
To do so in Django the easiest option would be to serialize request.META and request.body to a JSON dict.
If you really need something that resembles an HTTP request (and you are unable to go a level up to e.g. the webserver to log this information) you'll just have to piece this together from the information available in request.META and request.body, with the caveats that this is not a realistic representation of the original HTTP request.