Return the current user with Django Rest Framework

With something like this you're probably best off breaking out of the generic views and writing the view yourself.

@api_view(['GET'])def current_user(request):    serializer = UserSerializer(request.user)    return Response(serializer.data)

You could also do the same thing using a class based view like so...

class CurrentUserView(APIView):    def get(self, request):        serializer = UserSerializer(request.user)        return Response(serializer.data)

Of course, there's also no requirement that you use a serializer, you could equally well just pull out the fields you need from the user instance.

@api_view(['GET'])def current_user(request):    user = request.user    return Response({        'username': user.username,        'email': user.email,        ...    })

Hope that helps.

The best way is to use the power of viewsets.ModelViewSet like so:

class UserViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):    queryset = User.objects.all()    serializer_class = UserSerializer    def get_object(self):        pk = self.kwargs.get('pk')        if pk == "current":            return self.request.user        return super(UserViewSet, self).get_object()

viewsets.ModelViewSet is a combination of mixins.CreateModelMixin + mixins.RetrieveModelMixin + mixins.UpdateModelMixin + mixins.DestroyModelMixin + mixins.ListModelMixin + viewsets.GenericViewSet. If you need just list all or get particular user including currently authenticated you need just replace it like this

class UserViewSet(mixins.RetrieveModelMixin, mixins.ListModelMixin, viewsets.GenericViewSet):    # ...

If you must use the generic view set for some reason, you could do something like this,

class UserViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):    model = User    serializer_class = UserSerializer    def get_object(self):        return self.request.user    def list(self, request, *args, **kwargs):        return self.retrieve(request, *args, **kwargs)

retrieve method is called when the client requests a single instance using an identifier like a primary key /users/10 would trigger the retrieve method normally. Retrieve itself calls get_object. If you want the view to always return the current used then you could modify get_object and force list method to return a single item instead of a list by calling and returning self.retrieve inside it.