Django - redirect to login page vs. 403

Why does Django re开发者_开发技巧directs user to login page when trying to access pages protected by permissions? Wouldn't it make more sense to raise 403? Then I could display meaningful message in 403.html (using custom middleware) to user saying they don't have permissions to perform the action. Also I would be able to identify links to views that user shouldn't even be presented with at first place or users trying to access forbidden resources.

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For future googlers, the permission_required decorator accepts an optional raise_exception keyword argument that will trigger a 403 if the user doesn't have the appropriate permission.

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If you're talking about the login_required decorator, there's no reason you have to use that. You could write a similar decorator that did the very thing you're looking for (return a 403 response).

Unfortunately, the login_required decorator code is actually somewhat complex so it wouldn't be trivial to just copy/modify for your needs, as the redirect portion is actually within the user_passes_test function that they use.