Return the current user with Django Rest Framework

With something like this you’re probably best off breaking out of the generic views and writing the view yourself.

@api_view(['GET'])
def current_user(request):
    serializer = UserSerializer(request.user)
    return Response(serializer.data)

You could also do the same thing using a class based view like so…

class CurrentUserView(APIView):
    def get(self, request):
        serializer = UserSerializer(request.user)
        return Response(serializer.data)

Of course, there’s also no requirement that you use a serializer, you could equally well just pull out the fields you need from the user instance.

@api_view(['GET'])
def current_user(request):
    user = request.user
    return Response({
        'username': user.username,
        'email': user.email,
        ...
    })