drf-spectacular ships with sane default settings that should work reasonably well out of the box. It is not necessary to specify any settings, but we recommend to specify at least some metadata.

This is one of the more involved extension mechanisms. drf-spectacular uses those to implement polymorphic serializers. The usage of this extension is rarely necessary because most custom …

It is recommended to provide a singular example value, since pagination and list responses are handled by drf-spectacular. The example will be attached to the operation object where …

# Example: 'drf_spectacular.hooks.preprocess_exclude_path_format' 'PREPROCESSING_HOOKS': [], # Determines how operations should be sorted. If you intend …

In drf-spectacular there is support for auto-generating the security definitions for a number of authentication classes built in to DRF as well as other popular third-party packages.

drf-spectacular aims to generate the most accurate schema possible under the constraints of OpenAPI 3.0.3. Unfortunately, sometimes this goal conflicts with generating a good and …

DRF provides a convenient FileField for storing files persistently within a Model. drf-spectacular handles these correctly by default. But to serve binary files that are generated in-memory, …

Some libraries/apps do not play well with drf-spectacular ’s automatic introspection. With extensions you can manually provide the necessary information to generate a better schema. …

Nov 1, 2025 · Breaking changes / important additions: drf-spectacular ’s custom DjangoFilterBackend removed after previous deprecation. Just use the original class again. …

As an open source project, drf-spectacular welcomes any form of contribution. The project was initially forked off DRF’s schema generator and has since then been continually receiving …