Django Rest Framework ORJSON Renderer

drf_orjson_renderer is JSON renderer and parser for Django Rest Framework using the orjson library. Backed by Rust, orjson is safe, correct and fast. ⚡️

In addition, unlike some performance optimized DRF renderers, It also renders pretty printed JSON when requests are made via RestFramework's BrowsableAPI.

You get:

• The safety of Rust
• The speed of orjson when requests are made with Accept: appliation/json HTTP header or when requests are made with an unspecified Accept header.
• The convenience of formatted output when requested with Accept: text/html.
• The ability to pass your own default function definition.

Installation

pip install drf_orjson_renderer

You can then set the ORJSONRenderer class as your default renderer in your settings.py

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    "DEFAULT_RENDERER_CLASSES": (
        "drf_orjson_renderer.renderers.ORJSONRenderer",
        "rest_framework.renderers.BrowsableAPIRenderer",
    ),
}

To modify how data is serialized, specify options in your settings.py

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    "ORJSON_RENDERER_OPTIONS": (
        orjson.OPT_NON_STR_KEYS,
        orjson.OPT_SERIALIZE_DATACLASS,
        orjson.OPT_SERIALIZE_NUMPY,
    ),
}

Also you can set the ORJSONParser class as your default parser in your settings.py

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    "DEFAULT_PARSER_CLASSES": (
        "drf_orjson_renderer.parsers.ORJSONParser",
    ),
}

Passing Your Own default Function

By default, the ORJSONRenderer will pass a default function as a helper for serializing objects that orjson doesn't recognize. That should cover the most common cases found in a Django web application. If you find you have an object it doesn't recognize you can pass your own default function by overriding the get_renderer_context() method of your view:

from rest_framework.views import APIView
from rest_framework.response import Response


class MyView(APIView):
    def default(self, obj):
        if isinstance(obj, MyComplexData):
            return dict(obj)

    def get_renderer_context(self):
        renderer_context = super().get_renderer_context()
        renderer_context["default_function"] = self.default
        return renderer_context

    def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        my_complex_data = MyComplexData()
        return Response(data=my_complex_data)

If you know your data is already in a format orjson natively recognizes you can get a small performance boost by passing None to the renderer_context:

def get_renderer_context(self):
    renderer_context = super().get_renderer_context()
    renderer_context["default_function"] = None
    return renderer_context

As of ORJSON version 3, 2-space indenting is supported in serialization. In order to take advantage of the RestFramework Browsable API, when the requested media type is not application/json, the ORJSON renderer will add orjson.OPT_INDENT_2 to the options mask to pretty print your output.

Numpy

When this package was originally written ORJSON did not natively support serializing numpy types. This package provided an encoder class that overrides the DjangoJSONEncoder with support for numpy types. This encoder is no longer necessary but included for backwards compatibility. As of version 1.8.0, the encoder supports NumPy 2.0.

from drf_orjson_renderer.encoders import DjangoNumpyJSONEncoder
from rest_framework.views import APIView

class MyView(APIView):


    def get_renderer_context(self):
        renderer_context = super().get_renderer_context()
        renderer_context["django_encoder_class"] = DjangoNumpyJSONEncoder
        return renderer_context

Benchmarks

See the orjson Benchmarks for more information