django-formguard

Invisible form protection for Django. A pluggable check pipeline that catches bots without any user interaction.

How It Works

FormGuard runs a series of checks against each form submission:

Field trap - hidden honeypot field that bots fill in
Token - signed timestamp that catches fast or tampered submissions
JS challenge - nonce computation that requires JavaScript execution
Interaction proof - detects real user input (accessible to screen readers)

All checks are invisible to real users. Check failures are handled as standard form validation errors, with customizable failure handling for honeypot-style silent rejection.

FormGuard is extensible. Cloudflare Turnstile is available as a contrib check, and you can write your own.

Installation

pip install django-formguard

Add 'formguard' to your INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'formguard',
]

Quick Start

1. Set up your form

Add GuardedFormMixin to your form.

from django import forms
from formguard.conf import default_checks
from formguard.forms import GuardedFormMixin

class ContactForm(GuardedFormMixin, forms.Form):
    guard_checks = default_checks(exclude=['formguard.checks.InteractionCheck'])

    name = forms.CharField()
    email = forms.EmailField()
    message = forms.CharField(widget=forms.Textarea)

default_checks() returns the built-in check list. Use include and exclude to customize it, or omit guard_checks entirely to use all defaults.

2. Set up your template

Include {{ form.media }} in your <head> so the honeypot CSS and JS checks load.

<head>
    {{ form.media }}
</head>
<body>
    <form method="post">
        {% csrf_token %}
        {{ form }}
        <button type="submit">Send</button>
    </form>
</body>

If you render fields manually, include {{ form.guard_fields }} to add the FormGuard fields.

3. Check submissions in your view

Guard checks run inside is_valid(), so your view uses standard Django patterns.

Class-based views - use GuardedFormViewMixin:

from django.views.generic import FormView
from formguard.views import GuardedFormViewMixin

class ContactView(GuardedFormViewMixin, FormView):
    form_class = ContactForm
    template_name = 'contact.html'
    success_url = '/thanks/'

    def form_valid(self, form):
        send_email(form.cleaned_data)
        return super().form_valid(form)

If a check fails, the form returns an error message. To silently redirect bots to a fake success page instead, see Failure Handling.

Function-based views - see Function-Based Views

Settings

All settings are optional. Defaults work out of the box. All four built-in checks are enabled by default.

# add a custom check alongside the builtins
from formguard.conf import BUILTINS
FORMGUARD_CHECKS = BUILTINS + [
    'myapp.checks.TurnstileCheck',
]

# tune the built-in checks
FORMGUARD_FIELD_TRAP_FIELD_NAME = 'website'  # default
FORMGUARD_TOKEN_MIN_SECONDS = 3              # default
FORMGUARD_TOKEN_MAX_SECONDS = 3600           # default

CSP Compatibility

FormGuard uses external static files for CSS and JS (no inline styles or scripts), so it works with Content Security Policy out of the box when 'self' is in your script-src and style-src.

For strict nonce-based CSP policies, use django-csp-helpers to add nonces to the {{ form.media }} output.

License

This software is released under the MIT license.

Copyright (c) 2026 Luke Rogers

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

Release files for django-formguard 0.10.0

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Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for django-formguard 0.10.0
File	Size	Uploaded
django_formguard-0.10.0.tar.gz	51.1 kB	Aug 20, 2026	Details

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Table of built distributions (wheels) for django-formguard 0.10.0
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
django_formguard-0.10.0-py3-none-any.whl 17.5 kB Aug 20, 2026	Python 3	none	any	Details

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Release files / django_formguard-0.10.0.tar.gz

Download URL	django_formguard-0.10.0.tar.gz
Size	51.1 kB
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Release files / django_formguard-0.10.0-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	django_formguard-0.10.0-py3-none-any.whl
Size	17.5 kB
Tags	Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`da24d5ae1327e8ebf803cfee45fa88fc0ca0c4c3b0342769733eced5cf4fff09`
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Upload date	Aug 20, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	Yes
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14`

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Identity

Publishing platform: GitHub Actions
Publishing repository: github.com/dmptrluke/django-formguard
Publishing commit: github.com/dmptrluke/django-formguard/tree/c35f29e143d22b0cdb646e657bbab23579c1650f

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Publishing configuration: github.com/dmptrluke/django-formguard/blob/c35f29e143d22b0cdb646e657bbab23579c1650f/.github/workflows/release.yml
Publishing logs: github.com/dmptrluke/django-formguard/actions/runs/32342734772/attempts/1

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