Authentication is the mechanism of associating an incoming request with a set of identifying credentials, such as the user the request came from, or the token that it was signed with. The [permission] and [throttling] policies can then use those credentials to determine if the request should be permitted.
Authentication is always run at the very start of the view, before the permission and throttling checks occur, and before any other code is allowed to proceed.
The `request.auth` property is used for any additional authentication information, for example, it may be used to represent an authentication token that the request was signed with.
**Note:** Don't forget that **authentication by itself won't allow or disallow an incoming request**, it simply identifies the credentials that the request was made with.
For information on how to setup the permission polices for your API please see the [permissions documentation][permission].
The authentication schemes are always defined as a list of classes. REST framework will attempt to authenticate with each class in the list, and will set `request.user` and `request.auth` using the return value of the first class that successfully authenticates.
If no class authenticates, `request.user` will be set to an instance of `django.contrib.auth.models.AnonymousUser`, and `request.auth` will be set to `None`.
The value of `request.user` and `request.auth` for unauthenticated requests can be modified using the `UNAUTHENTICATED_USER` and `UNAUTHENTICATED_TOKEN` settings.
HTTP 401 responses must always include a `WWW-Authenticate` header, that instructs the client how to authenticate. HTTP 403 responses do not include the `WWW-Authenticate` header.
The kind of response that will be used depends on the authentication scheme. Although multiple authentication schemes may be in use, only one scheme may be used to determine the type of response. **The first authentication class set on the view is used when determining the type of response**.
Note that when a request may successfully authenticate, but still be denied permission to perform the request, in which case a `403 Permission Denied` response will always be used, regardless of the authentication scheme.
Note that if deploying to [Apache using mod_wsgi][mod_wsgi_official], the authorization header is not passed through to a WSGI application by default, as it is assumed that authentication will be handled by Apache, rather than at an application level.
If you are deploying to Apache, and using any non-session based authentication, you will need to explicitly configure mod_wsgi to pass the required headers through to the application. This can be done by specifying the `WSGIPassAuthorization` directive in the appropriate context and setting it to `'On'`.
This authentication scheme uses [HTTP Basic Authentication][basicauth], signed against a user's username and password. Basic authentication is generally only appropriate for testing.
Unauthenticated responses that are denied permission will result in an `HTTP 401 Unauthorized` response with an appropriate WWW-Authenticate header. For example:
**Note:** If you use `BasicAuthentication` in production you must ensure that your API is only available over `https`. You should also ensure that your API clients will always re-request the username and password at login, and will never store those details to persistent storage.
This authentication scheme uses a simple token-based HTTP Authentication scheme. Token authentication is appropriate for client-server setups, such as native desktop and mobile clients.
To use the `TokenAuthentication` scheme you'll need to [configure the authentication classes](#setting-the-authentication-scheme) to include `TokenAuthentication`, and additionally include `rest_framework.authtoken` in your `INSTALLED_APPS` setting:
Make sure to run `manage.py syncdb` after changing your settings. The `authtoken` database tables are managed by south (see [Schema migrations](#schema-migrations) below).
For clients to authenticate, the token key should be included in the `Authorization` HTTP header. The key should be prefixed by the string literal "Token", with whitespace separating the two strings. For example:
Unauthenticated responses that are denied permission will result in an `HTTP 401 Unauthorized` response with an appropriate WWW-Authenticate header. For example:
Note that you'll want to ensure you place this code snippet in an installed `models.py` module, or some other location that will be imported by Django on startup.
When using `TokenAuthentication`, you may want to provide a mechanism for clients to obtain a token given the username and password. REST framework provides a built-in view to provide this behavior. To use it, add the `obtain_auth_token` view to your URLconf:
Note that the default `obtain_auth_token` view explicitly uses JSON requests and responses, rather than using default renderer and parser classes in your settings. If you need a customized version of the `obtain_auth_token` view, you can do so by overriding the `ObtainAuthToken` view class, and using that in your url conf instead.
The `rest_framework.authtoken` app includes a south migration that will create the authtoken table.
If you're using a [custom user model][custom-user-model] you'll need to make sure that any initial migration that creates the user table runs before the authtoken table is created.
Also note that if you're using a `post_save` signal to create tokens, then the first time you create the database tables, you'll need to ensure any migrations are run prior to creating any superusers. For example:
This authentication scheme uses Django's default session backend for authentication. Session authentication is appropriate for AJAX clients that are running in the same session context as your website.
If you're using an AJAX style API with SessionAuthentication, you'll need to make sure you include a valid CSRF token for any "unsafe" HTTP method calls, such as `PUT`, `PATCH`, `POST` or `DELETE` requests. See the [Django CSRF documentation][csrf-ajax] for more details.
This authentication uses [OAuth 1.0a][oauth-1.0a] authentication scheme. OAuth 1.0a provides signature validation which provides a reasonable level of security over plain non-HTTPS connections. However, it may also be considered more complicated than OAuth2, as it requires clients to sign their requests.
This authentication class depends on the optional `django-oauth-plus` and `oauth2` packages. In order to make it work you must install these packages and add `oauth_provider` to your `INSTALLED_APPS`:
The OAuthAuthentication class only provides token verification and signature validation for requests. It doesn't provide authorization flow for your clients. You still need to implement your own views for accessing and authorizing tokens.
The `django-oauth-plus` package provides simple foundation for classic 'three-legged' oauth flow. Please refer to [the documentation][django-oauth-plus] for more details.
This authentication uses [OAuth 2.0][rfc6749] authentication scheme. OAuth2 is more simple to work with than OAuth1, and provides much better security than simple token authentication. It is an unauthenticated scheme, and requires you to use an HTTPS connection.
This authentication class depends on the optional [django-oauth2-provider][django-oauth2-provider] project. In order to make it work you must install this package and add `provider` and `provider.oauth2` to your `INSTALLED_APPS`:
The OAuth 2 authorization flow is taken care by the [django-oauth2-provider][django-oauth2-provider] dependency. A walkthrough is given here, but for more details you should refer to [the documentation][django-oauth2-provider-docs].
The only thing needed to make the `OAuth2Authentication` class work is to insert the `access_token` you've received in the `Authorization` request header.
To implement a custom authentication scheme, subclass `BaseAuthentication` and override the `.authenticate(self, request)` method. The method should return a two-tuple of `(user, auth)` if authentication succeeds, or `None` otherwise.
* If authentication is attempted but fails, raise a `AuthenticationFailed` exception. An error response will be returned immediately, regardless of any permissions checks, and without checking any other authentication schemes.
You *may* also override the `.authenticate_header(self, request)` method. If implemented, it should return a string that will be used as the value of the `WWW-Authenticate` header in a `HTTP 401 Unauthorized` response.
If the `.authenticate_header()` method is not overridden, the authentication scheme will return `HTTP 403 Forbidden` responses when an unauthenticated request is denied access.
The following third party packages are also available.
## Digest Authentication
HTTP digest authentication is a widely implemented scheme that was intended to replace HTTP basic authentication, and which provides a simple encrypted authentication mechanism. [Juan Riaza][juanriaza] maintains the [djangorestframework-digestauth][djangorestframework-digestauth] package which provides HTTP digest authentication support for REST framework.
The [Django OAuth Toolkit][django-oauth-toolkit] package provides OAuth 2.0 support, and works with Python 2.7 and Python 3.3+. The package is maintained by [Evonove][evonove] and uses the excelllent [OAuthLib][oauthlib]. The package is well documented, and comes as a recommended alternative for OAuth 2.0 support.
The [Django OAuth2 Consumer][doac] library from [Rediker Software][rediker] is another package that provides [OAuth 2.0 support for REST framework][doac-rest-framework]. The package includes token scoping permissions on tokens, which allows finer-grained access to your API.
JSON Web Token is a fairly new standard which can be used for token-based authentication. Unlike the built-in TokenAuthentication scheme, JWT Authentication doesn't need to use a database to validate a token. [Blimp][blimp] maintains the [djangorestframework-jwt][djangorestframework-jwt] package which provides a JWT Authentication class as well as a mechanism for clients to obtain a JWT given the username and password.
The [HawkREST][hawkrest] library builds on the [Mohawk][mohawk] library to let you work with [Hawk][hawk] signed requests and responses in your API. [Hawk][hawk] lets two parties securely communicate with each other using messages signed by a shared key. It is based on [HTTP MAC access authentication][mac] (which was based on parts of [OAuth 1.0][oauth-1.0a]).
HTTP Signature (currently a [IETF draft][http-signature-ietf-draft]) provides a way to achieve origin authentication and message integrity for HTTP messages. Similar to [Amazon's HTTP Signature scheme][amazon-http-signature], used by many of its services, it permits stateless, per-request authentication. [Elvio Toccalino][etoccalino] maintains the [djangorestframework-httpsignature][djangorestframework-httpsignature] package which provides an easy to use HTTP Signature Authentication mechanism.
