Quick start

Default configuration

To apply default security headers to all responses:

1. Installation

   1. From pip

      pip install django-security-headers
      

   2. To access the scan function from httpobs, add the following to your project’s dev requirements

      -e git+https://github.com/jsumnerPhD/http-observatory#egg=httpobs
      

2. Add the csp, security_headers middlewares. For Django 1.11, also add the samesite middleware

   MIDDLEWARES = [
     "django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware",
     "csp.middleware.CSPMiddleware",
     "security_headers.middleware.extra_security_headers_middleware",
     "django_cookies_samesite.middleware.CookiesSameSite", # Not needed for Django 2.2
      ...
   ]
   

3. Add the default csp and security_headers settings by importing the defaults to your local settings.py

   from security_headers.defaults import *
   

4. Add security_headers to your INSTALLED_APPS.

   INSTALLED_APPS = [
     ...
     "security_headers",
     ...
   ]
   

This will expose a simple admin interface for specifying safe domains.

Optional configuration

If you included step 1b, you can add a scan link to urls.py. Accessing this link will run a scan against https://127.0.0.1:8000/<path> where the path is determined from reversing url_name. Note that the sslserver must be running in parallel to the request.

from security_headers.views import scan_url

if settings.DEBUG:
    urlpatterns += i18n_patterns(
        url(r"^security/(?P<url_name>[\w-]+)/", scan_url, name="scan")
    )

For newer Django syntax

urlpatterns += [path("security/<slug:url_name>/", scan_url, name="scan")]

To access template tags provided by django-csp, add csp to INSTALLED_APPS

INSTALLED_APPS = [
  ...
  "security_headers",
  "csp",
  ...
]

To use the sslserver (provided by django-sslserver through ./manage.py runsslserver)

INSTALLED_APPS = [
  ...
  "security_headers",
  "csp",
  "sslserver",
  ...
]

Development settings

During development, you will need to overwrite some default settings if not using the ssl server. At the very end of your settings.py file, include

if "runsslserver" in sys.argv:
    SSL_CONTEXT = True
else:
    SSL_CONTEXT = False

CSRF_COOKIE_SECURE = SSL_CONTEXT
SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT = SSL_CONTEXT
SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = SSL_CONTEXT

SECURE_HSTS_SECONDS = 3600

Reducing SECURE_HSTS_SECONDS time is also a good idea during development.