TurboDRF

Dead simple Django REST Framework API generator with role-based permissions.

Turn your Django models into fully-featured REST APIs with a mixin and a method. Zero boilerplate.

Install

pip install turbodrf

# Optional: faster JSON rendering (7x faster than stdlib)
pip install turbodrf[fast]

Quick Start

1. Add to settings:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'rest_framework',
    'turbodrf',
]

2. Add the mixin to your model:

from django.db import models
from turbodrf.mixins import TurboDRFMixin

class Book(models.Model, TurboDRFMixin):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    author = models.ForeignKey(Author, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    price = models.DecimalField(max_digits=10, decimal_places=2)

    searchable_fields = ['title']

    @classmethod
    def turbodrf(cls):
        return {
            'fields': {
                'list': ['title', 'author__name', 'price'],
                'detail': ['title', 'author__name', 'author__email', 'price']
            }
        }

3. Add the router:

from turbodrf.router import TurboDRFRouter

router = TurboDRFRouter()

urlpatterns = [
    path('api/', include(router.urls)),
]

Done. You now have a full REST API with search, filtering, pagination, and field selection:

GET    /api/books/                          # List
GET    /api/books/1/                        # Detail
POST   /api/books/                          # Create
PUT    /api/books/1/                        # Update
DELETE /api/books/1/                        # Delete
GET    /api/books/?search=django            # Search
GET    /api/books/?price__lt=20             # Filter
GET    /api/books/?fields=title,price       # Select fields

Documentation

• Configuration -- all turbodrf() options, field selection, nested fields
• Permissions -- role-based, field-level, and Django default permissions
• Tenancy & row-level access -- predicates, multi-tenancy, FK injection defense
• RLS (Postgres) -- optional defense-in-depth at the database layer
• Performance -- compiled read path, fast JSON rendering, benchmarking
• Filtering & Search -- filtering, search, ordering, OR queries
• Integrations -- allauth, Keycloak, drf-api-tracking (all experimental)
• Security -- sensitive fields, secure defaults, error responses
• Management Commands -- turbodrf_check, turbodrf_benchmark, turbodrf_explain
• Settings Reference -- every TURBODRF_* setting in one place

Permissions and access control

TurboDRF answers four standard authorization questions, in three layers that all apply to every request (AND'd together):

How it actually works (concrete walk-through)

A multi-tenant SaaS has two workspaces (ABC and XYZ) and three roles: member, manager, admin. A Project model is configured:

class Project(models.Model, TurboDRFMixin):
    workspace = models.ForeignKey(Workspace, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    owner = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

    @classmethod
    def turbodrf(cls):
        return {
            'tenant_field': 'workspace',                       # mandatory wall
            'owner_field': 'owner',             # within-tenant rule
            'bypass_owner_roles': ['manager', 'admin'],        # roles ignore owner check
            'fields': ['title', 'workspace', 'owner'],
        }

Plus two project-wide settings:

TURBODRF_TENANT_MODEL = 'accounts.Workspace'
TURBODRF_TENANT_USER_FIELD = 'workspace'   # request.user.workspace → tenant

Now a request GET /api/projects/ from Alice (member at ABC) goes through:

1. Permission gate — Alice's role member has app.project.read. Pass.
2. Tenant filter (mandatory, applied first, never bypassable): sql WHERE project.workspace_id = <Alice's workspace>
3. Owner filter (Alice has no bypass role, so this layer applies): sql AND project.owner_id = <Alice's user id>
4. Field stripping — Alice's role has read on title, workspace, owner but maybe not all configured fields. Hidden ones are removed from the response.

If Alice tries cross-tenant tricks: - GET /api/projects/<XYZ_project_id>/ → 404 (not 403, no existence leak) - PATCH /api/projects/<her_project_id>/ {"workspace": <XYZ>} → 400 (tenant reassignment rejected) - POST /api/comments/ {"document": <XYZ_bank_id>} → 400 (FK injection rejected)

If a manager (with bypass) at ABC asks for /api/projects/:

WHERE project.workspace_id = <ABC's workspace id>
-- no owner filter (manager bypassed it)

Manager sees all ABC projects, but still can't see XYZ — the tenant boundary is mandatory and applied separately from the predicate algebra (it's a setting, not a predicate). This rules out an entire class of compositional bugs where bypass roles could OR-compose their way past the tenant wall.

Optional: Postgres Row Level Security (defense in depth)

For Postgres deployments, TurboDRF can additionally generate RLS policies that enforce the same rules at the database layer — every connection is filtered by Postgres itself, so even raw SQL or admin scripts are blocked. App-layer is the source of truth; RLS is a backup. See docs/rls.md. RLS is off by default (three manual steps to enable: install middleware, run turbodrf_emit_rls, apply the SQL).

Performance

Tenant + owner predicates add ~0 measurable latency vs. the unscoped baseline (predicates compile to a single Q AND'd onto the queryset; the WHERE clause runs at the DB layer with index hits). FK injection check on writes adds ~one .exists() query per FK in the request body. Both are negligible for typical workloads. See docs/performance.md for benchmarking the compiled vs DRF read paths.

Quick recipes

# Multi-tenant SaaS — most common case
{'tenant_field': 'store', 'owner_field': 'customer', 'bypass_owner_roles': ['staff']}

# Personal data app (no tenant)
{'owner_field': 'author', 'bypass_owner_roles': ['admin']}

# Reference data (currencies, country codes — not tenant-scoped)
{'tenancy': 'shared'}

# M2M membership (Slack channels, Linear projects)
{'visibility': [Tenant('workspace'), Members('participants')]}

# Power-form composition (when sugar doesn't fit)
{'visibility': [Tenant('workspace'), Either(Owner('owner'), Members('shared_with'))]}

See docs/tenancy.md for the full predicate vocabulary, hard-fail-at-startup behavior, and 404-vs-403 semantics.

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.