How do I access the request object or any other variable in a form's clean() method?

The answer by Ber - storing it in threadlocals - is a very bad idea. There's absolutely no reason to do it this way.

A much better way is to override the form's __init__ method to take an extra keyword argument, request. This stores the request in the form, where it's required, and from where you can access it in your clean method.

class MyForm(forms.Form):

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.request = kwargs.pop('request', None)
        super(MyForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)


    def clean(self):
        ... access the request object via self.request ...

and in your view:

myform = MyForm(request.POST, request=request)

The usual aproach is to store the request object in a thread-local reference using a middleware. Then you can access this from anywhere in you app, including the Form.clean() method.

Changing the signature of the Form.clean() method means you have you own, modified version of Django, which may not be what you want.

Thank middleware count look something like this:

import threading
_thread_locals = threading.local()

def get_current_request():
    return getattr(_thread_locals, 'request', None)

class ThreadLocals(object):
    """
    Middleware that gets various objects from the
    request object and saves them in thread local storage.
    """
    def process_request(self, request):
        _thread_locals.request = request

Register this middleware as described in the Django docs

I have another answer to this question as per your requirement you want to access the user into the clean method of the form. You can Try this. View.py

person=User.objects.get(id=person_id)
form=MyForm(request.POST,instance=person)

forms.py

def __init__(self,*arg,**kwargs):
    self.instance=kwargs.get('instance',None)
    if kwargs['instance'] is not None:
        del kwargs['instance']
    super(Myform, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

Now you can access the self.instance in any clean method in form.py

When you want to access it through "prepared" Django class views like CreateView there's a small trick to know (= the official solution doesn't work out of the box). In your own CreateView you'll have to add code like this:

class MyCreateView(LoginRequiredMixin, CreateView):
    form_class = MyOwnForm
    template_name = 'my_sample_create.html'

    def get_form_kwargs(self):
        result = super().get_form_kwargs()
        result['request'] = self.request
        return result

= in short this is the solution to pass request to your form with Django's Create/Update views.