starlette/docs/middleware.md

Starlette includes several middleware classes for adding behavior that is applied across your entire application. These are all implemented as standard ASGI middleware classes, and can be applied either to Starlette or to any other ASGI application.

The Starlette application class allows you to include the ASGI middleware in a way that ensures that it remains wrapped by the exception handler.

from starlette.applications import Starlette
from starlette.middleware import Middleware
from starlette.middleware.httpsredirect import HTTPSRedirectMiddleware
from starlette.middleware.trustedhost import TrustedHostMiddleware

routes = ...

# Ensure that all requests include an 'example.com' or '*.example.com' host header,
# and strictly enforce https-only access.
middleware = [
  Middleware(TrustedHostMiddleware, allowed_hosts=['example.com', '*.example.com']),
  Middleware(HTTPSRedirectMiddleware)
]

app = Starlette(routes=routes, middleware=middleware)

Every Starlette application automatically includes two pieces of middleware by default:

• ServerErrorMiddleware - Ensures that application exceptions may return a custom 500 page, or display an application traceback in DEBUG mode. This is always the outermost middleware layer.
• ExceptionMiddleware - Adds exception handlers, so that particular types of expected exception cases can be associated with handler functions. For example raising HTTPException(status_code=404) within an endpoint will end up rendering a custom 404 page.

Middleware is evaluated from top-to-bottom, so the flow of execution in our example application would look like this:

• Middleware
  • ServerErrorMiddleware
  • TrustedHostMiddleware
  • HTTPSRedirectMiddleware
  • ExceptionMiddleware
• Routing
• Endpoint

The following middleware implementations are available in the Starlette package:

CORSMiddleware

Adds appropriate CORS headers to outgoing responses in order to allow cross-origin requests from browsers.

The default parameters used by the CORSMiddleware implementation are restrictive by default, so you'll need to explicitly enable particular origins, methods, or headers, in order for browsers to be permitted to use them in a Cross-Domain context.

from starlette.applications import Starlette
from starlette.middleware import Middleware
from starlette.middleware.cors import CORSMiddleware

routes = ...

middleware = [
    Middleware(CORSMiddleware, allow_origins=['*'])
]

app = Starlette(routes=routes, middleware=middleware)

The following arguments are supported:

• allow_origins - A list of origins that should be permitted to make cross-origin requests. eg. ['https://example.org', 'https://www.example.org']. You can use ['*'] to allow any origin.
• allow_origin_regex - A regex string to match against origins that should be permitted to make cross-origin requests. eg. 'https://.*\.example\.org'.
• allow_methods - A list of HTTP methods that should be allowed for cross-origin requests. Defaults to ['GET']. You can use ['*'] to allow all standard methods.
• allow_headers - A list of HTTP request headers that should be supported for cross-origin requests. Defaults to []. You can use ['*'] to allow all headers. The Accept, Accept-Language, Content-Language and Content-Type headers are always allowed for CORS requests.
• allow_credentials - Indicate that cookies should be supported for cross-origin requests. Defaults to False.
• expose_headers - Indicate any response headers that should be made accessible to the browser. Defaults to [].
• max_age - Sets a maximum time in seconds for browsers to cache CORS responses. Defaults to 600.

The middleware responds to two particular types of HTTP request...

CORS preflight requests

These are any OPTIONS request with Origin and Access-Control-Request-Method headers. In this case the middleware will intercept the incoming request and respond with appropriate CORS headers, and either a 200 or 400 response for informational purposes.

Simple requests

Any request with an Origin header. In this case the middleware will pass the request through as normal, but will include appropriate CORS headers on the response.

SessionMiddleware

Adds signed cookie-based HTTP sessions. Session information is readable but not modifiable.

Access or modify the session data using the request.session dictionary interface.

The following arguments are supported:

• secret_key - Should be a random string.
• session_cookie - Defaults to "session".
• max_age - Session expiry time in seconds. Defaults to 2 weeks. If set to None then the cookie will last as long as the browser session.
• same_site - SameSite flag prevents the browser from sending session cookie along with cross-site requests. Defaults to 'lax'.
• https_only - Indicate that Secure flag should be set (can be used with HTTPS only). Defaults to False.

HTTPSRedirectMiddleware

Enforces that all incoming requests must either be https or wss. Any incoming requests to http or ws will be redirected to the secure scheme instead.

from starlette.applications import Starlette
from starlette.middleware.httpsredirect import HTTPSRedirectMiddleware

routes = ...

middleware = [
    Middleware(HTTPSRedirectMiddleware)
]

app = Starlette(routes=routes, middleware=middleware)

There are no configuration options for this middleware class.

TrustedHostMiddleware

Enforces that all incoming requests have a correctly set Host header, in order to guard against HTTP Host Header attacks.

from starlette.applications import Starlette
from starlette.middleware import Middleware
from starlette.middleware.trustedhost import TrustedHostMiddleware

routes = ...

middleware = [
    Middleware(TrustedHostMiddleware, allowed_hosts=['example.com', '*.example.com'])
]

app = Starlette(routes=routes, middleware=middleware)

The following arguments are supported:

• allowed_hosts - A list of domain names that should be allowed as hostnames. Wildcard domains such as *.example.com are supported for matching subdomains. To allow any hostname either use allowed_hosts=["*"] or omit the middleware.

If an incoming request does not validate correctly then a 400 response will be sent.

GZipMiddleware

Handles GZip responses for any request that includes "gzip" in the Accept-Encoding header.

The middleware will handle both standard and streaming responses.

from starlette.applications import Starlette
from starlette.middleware import Middleware
from starlette.middleware.gzip import GZipMiddleware


routes = ...

middleware = [
    Middleware(GZipMiddleware, minimum_size=1000)
]

app = Starlette(routes=routes, middleware=middleware)

The following arguments are supported:

• minimum_size - Do not GZip responses that are smaller than this minimum size in bytes. Defaults to 500.

BaseHTTPMiddleware

An abstract class that allows you to write ASGI middleware against a request/response interface, rather than dealing with ASGI messages directly.

To implement a middleware class using BaseHTTPMiddleware, you must override the async def dispatch(request, call_next) method.

from starlette.middleware.base import BaseHTTPMiddleware

class CustomHeaderMiddleware(BaseHTTPMiddleware):
    async def dispatch(self, request, call_next):
        response = await call_next(request)
        response.headers['Custom'] = 'Example'
        return response

middleware = [
    Middleware(CustomHeaderMiddleware)
]

app = Starlette(routes=routes, middleware=middleware)

If you want to provide configuration options to the middleware class you should override the __init__ method, ensuring that the first argument is app, and any remaining arguments are optional keyword arguments. Make sure to set the app attribute on the instance if you do this.

class CustomHeaderMiddleware(BaseHTTPMiddleware):
    def __init__(self, app, header_value='Example'):
        super().__init__(app)
        self.header_value = header_value

    async def dispatch(self, request, call_next):
        response = await call_next(request)
        response.headers['Custom'] = self.header_value
        return response


middleware = [
    Middleware(CustomHeaderMiddleware, header_value='Customized')
]

app = Starlette(routes=routes, middleware=middleware)

Middleware classes should not modify their state outside of the __init__ method. Instead you should keep any state local to the dispatch method, or pass it around explicitly, rather than mutating the middleware instance.

!!! bug Currently, the BaseHTTPMiddleware has some known issues:

- It's not possible to use `BackgroundTasks` with `BaseHTTPMiddleware`. Check [#1438](https://github.com/encode/starlette/issues/1438) for more details.
- Using `BaseHTTPMiddleware` will prevent changes to [`contextlib.ContextVar`](https://docs.python.org/3/library/contextvars.html#contextvars.ContextVar)s from propagating upwards. That is, if you set a value for a `ContextVar` in your endpoint and try to read it from a middleware you will find that the value is not the same value you set in your endpoint (see [this test](https://github.com/encode/starlette/blob/621abc747a6604825190b93467918a0ec6456a24/tests/middleware/test_base.py#L192-L223) for an example of this behavior).

Using middleware in other frameworks

To wrap ASGI middleware around other ASGI applications, you should use the more general pattern of wrapping the application instance:

app = TrustedHostMiddleware(app, allowed_hosts=['example.com'])

You can do this with a Starlette application instance too, but it is preferable to use the middleware=<List of Middleware instances> style, as it will:

• Ensure that everything remains wrapped in a single outermost ServerErrorMiddleware.
• Preserves the top-level app instance.

Third party middleware

asgi-auth-github

This middleware adds authentication to any ASGI application, requiring users to sign in using their GitHub account (via OAuth). Access can be restricted to specific users or to members of specific GitHub organizations or teams.

asgi-csrf

Middleware for protecting against CSRF attacks. This middleware implements the Double Submit Cookie pattern, where a cookie is set, then it is compared to a csrftoken hidden form field or an x-csrftoken HTTP header.

AuthlibMiddleware

A drop-in replacement for Starlette session middleware, using authlib's jwt module.

BugsnagMiddleware

A middleware class for logging exceptions to Bugsnag.

CSRFMiddleware

Middleware for protecting against CSRF attacks. This middleware implements the Double Submit Cookie pattern, where a cookie is set, then it is compared to an x-csrftoken HTTP header.

EarlyDataMiddleware

Middleware and decorator for detecting and denying TLSv1.3 early data requests.

PrometheusMiddleware

A middleware class for capturing Prometheus metrics related to requests and responses, including in progress requests, timing...

ProxyHeadersMiddleware

Uvicorn includes a middleware class for determining the client IP address, when proxy servers are being used, based on the X-Forwarded-Proto and X-Forwarded-For headers. For more complex proxy configurations, you might want to adapt this middleware.

RateLimitMiddleware

A rate limit middleware. Regular expression matches url; flexible rules; highly customizable. Very easy to use.

RequestIdMiddleware

A middleware class for reading/generating request IDs and attaching them to application logs.

RollbarMiddleware

A middleware class for logging exceptions, errors, and log messages to Rollbar.

SentryMiddleware

A middleware class for logging exceptions to Sentry.

StarletteOpentracing

A middleware class that emits tracing info to OpenTracing.io compatible tracers and can be used to profile and monitor distributed applications.

TimingMiddleware

A middleware class to emit timing information (cpu and wall time) for each request which passes through it. Includes examples for how to emit these timings as statsd metrics.

WSGIMiddleware

A middleware class in charge of converting a WSGI application into an ASGI one.