Hands-On RESTful Python Web Services - Second Edition

Understanding status codes for the responses

Django REST Framework declares a set of named constants for the different HTTP status codes in the status module. We will always use these named constants to return HTTP status codes.

It is bad practice to return numbers as status codes. We want our code to be easy to read and understand, and therefore, we will use descriptive HTTP status codes.

For example, in case we have to return a 404 Not Found status code, we will return status.HTTP_404_NOT_FOUND, instead of just 404. If we have to return a 201 Created status code, we will return status.HTTP_201_CREATED, instead of just 201.