How to return a JSON response in Django?

Hi Dev,

Welcome to a step-by-step tutorial on how to return a JSON response in Django. In this guide, you'll learn with easy examples how to return a JSON-encoded response using both modern and legacy methods. We’ll look at how to use Django’s JsonResponse and HttpResponse for APIs or dynamic web responses.

JSON is a lightweight and human-readable data format used commonly in web APIs to transmit structured data between server and client. Django provides multiple ways to return JSON data, depending on your version.

Let’s walk through two clear examples:

In this example, we use Django >= 1.7 with the JsonResponse class from django.http. This is the recommended way in modern Django versions. If your object is not a dictionary, set safe=False.

from django.http import JsonResponse

def index(request):
responseData = {
'id': 1,
'name': 'Mehul Bagda',
'roles' : ['Admin','User']
}

return JsonResponse(responseData)

This method is for Django versions < 1.7. We use HttpResponse along with json.dumps and explicitly set the content type to application/json.

import json
from django.http import HttpResponse

def index(request):
responseData = {
'id': 1,
'name': 'Mehul Bagda',
'roles' : ['Admin','User']
}

return HttpResponse(json.dumps(responseData), content_type="application/json")

{  
"id":1,
"name":"Mehul Bagda",
"roles":[  
"Admin",
"User"
]
}

I hope this helps you understand how to return JSON data in Django applications. Whether you're building a RESTful API or returning AJAX data, this is a fundamental technique.

Happy coding!