Add Django endpoint that doesn't require database connection
Up to my knowledge no.
If some Middlewares requires a database and you enabled them then they will be used for each request.
I did not read about a way of conditionally executing middlewares depending on the request's url.
So up to my knowledge a normal djangoview will not be able to handle such a status page.
The only solution, that I can imagine is your suggestion to implement a middleware, that is handled first, shortcuts all the other middlewares and returns the result.
I have a typical Django project that uses PostgreSQL as it's database backend. I need to set up a specific endpoint (/status/) that works even when the connection to the database is lost. The actual code is very simple (just returns the response directly without touching the DB) but when the DB is down I still get OperationalError when calling this endpoint. This is because I use some pieces of middleware that attempt to contact the database, e.g. session middleware and  auth middleware. Is there any way to implement such /status/ endpoint? I could theoretically implement this as a piece of middleware and put it before any other middleware but that seems as kind of hack.