django-rest-framework: api versioning

UPDATE:

versioning is now properly supported.

There are some answers from your link:

We found it practical and useful to put the version in the URL. It makes it easy to tell what you're using at a glance. We do alias /foo to /foo/(latest versions) for ease of use, shorter / cleaner URLs, etc, as the accepted answer suggests. Keeping backwards compatibility forever is often cost-prohibitive and/or very difficult. We prefer to give advanced notice of deprecation, redirects like suggested here, docs, and other mechanisms.

So we took this approach, plus allowing clients to specify the version in request header (X-Version), here is how we did it:

Structure in side the API app:

.├── __init__.py├── middlewares.py├── urls.py├── v1│   ├── __init__.py│   ├── account│   │   ├── __init__.py│   │   ├── serializers.py│   │   └── views.py│   └── urls.py└── v2    ├── __init__.py    ├── account    │   ├── __init__.py    │   ├── serializers.py    │   └── views.py    └── urls.py

project urls.py:

url(r'^api/', include('project.api.urls', namespace='api')),

api app level urls.py:

from django.conf.urls import *urlpatterns = patterns('',    url(r'', include('project.api.v2.urls', namespace='default')),    url(r'^v1/', include('project.api.v1.urls', namespace='v1')),)

version level urls.py

from django.conf.urls import *from .account import views as account_viewsfrom rest_framework.routers import DefaultRouterrouter = DefaultRouter()router.register('account', account_views.AccountView)router.register('myaccount', account_views.MyAccountView)urlpatterns = router.urls

create a middleware to switch to the correct code by changing the path_info, please note there is a caveat that namespace ('api') defined in project level urls is not flexible and needs to be known in middleware:

from django.core.urlresolvers import resolvefrom django.core.urlresolvers import reverseclass VersionSwitch(object):    def process_request(self, request):        r = resolve(request.path_info)        version = request.META.get('HTTP_X_VERSION', False)        if r.namespace.startswith('api:') and version:            old_version = r.namespace.split(':')[-1]            request.path_info = reverse('{}:{}'.format(r.namespace.replace(old_version, version), r.url_name), args=r.args, kwargs=r.kwargs)

Sample url:

curl -H "X-Version: v1" http://your.domain:8000/api/myaccount/

One way of doing this is to have the versioning specified as part of the media type.

This is what GitHub currently do for their API.

You can also include media type parameters in your accept headers, eg Accept: application/json; version=beta, which will successfully match against JSONRenderer. You can then code your view to behave differently depending on the accepted media type, see here.

There's lots of different patterns for versioning in APIs, and I wouldn't say there's any great consensus around the right approach yet, but that'd be one reasonable possibility.

Update Jan 2015: Better versioning support will be incoming in the 3.1.0 release. See [this pull request]

Update March 2015: Docs for the versioning API are now available.

(https://github.com/tomchristie/django-rest-framework/pull/2285) for more details.

@James Lin gave a great answer. In comments to the answer @Mar0ux asked what to do with broken HyperlinkedRelatedField fields.

I fixed this with changing HyperlinkedRelatedField to the SerializerMethodField and calling reverse with, very unobvious, passing extra parameter current_app to it.

For example, I have an app 'fruits_app', with namespace versions 'v1', 'v2'. And I have serializer of Fruit model. So to serialize url I create a field

url = serializers.SerializerMethodField()

And corresponding method:

def get_url(self, instance):    reverse.reverse('fruits_app:fruit-detail',        args=[instance.pk],        request=request,        current_app=request.version)

With nested namespaces you will need to change add those namespaces to current_app. For example, if you have an app 'fruits_app' with namespace versions 'v1', 'v2', and instance namespace 'bananas' inside the app, method for serializing Fruit url will look like:

def get_url(self, instance):    reverse.reverse('fruits_app:fruit-detail',        args=[instance.pk],        request=request,        current_app='bananas:{}'.format(request.version))