Authentication

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.

REST framework provides a number of authentication policies out of the box, and also allows you to implement custom policies.

Authentication will run the first time either the request.user or request.auth properties are accessed, and determines how those properties are initialized.

Setting the authentication policy

The default authentication policy may be set globally, using the DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES setting. For example.

API_SETTINGS = {
    'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': (
        'djangorestframework.authentication.SessionAuthentication',
    )
}

You can also set the authentication policy on a per-view basis, using the APIView class based views.

class ExampleView(APIView):
    authentication_classes = (SessionAuthentication,)

    def get(self, request, format=None):
        content = {
            'user': unicode(request.user),  # `django.contrib.auth.User` instance. 
            'auth': unicode(request.auth),  # None
        }
        return Response(content)

Or, if you're using the @api_view decorator with function based views.

@api_view(allowed=('GET',), authentication_classes=(SessionAuthentication,))
def example_view(request, format=None):
    content = {
        'user': unicode(request.user),  # `django.contrib.auth.User` instance. 
        'auth': unicode(request.auth),  # None
    }
    return Response(content)

UserBasicAuthentication

This policy uses HTTP Basic Authentication, signed against a user's username and password. User basic authentication is generally only appropriate for testing.

Note: If you run UserBasicAuthentication in production your API must be https only, or it will be completely insecure. 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.

If successfully authenticated, UserBasicAuthentication provides the following credentials.

request.user will be a django.contrib.auth.models.User instance.
request.auth will be None.

TokenBasicAuthentication

This policy uses HTTP Basic Authentication, signed against a token key and secret. Token basic authentication is appropriate for client-server setups, such as native desktop and mobile clients.

Note: If you run TokenBasicAuthentication in production your API must be https only, or it will be completely insecure.

If successfully authenticated, TokenBasicAuthentication provides the following credentials.

request.user will be a django.contrib.auth.models.User instance.
request.auth will be a djangorestframework.models.BasicToken instance.

OAuthAuthentication

This policy uses the OAuth 2.0 protocol to authenticate requests. OAuth is appropriate for server-server setups, such as when you want to allow a third-party service to access your API on a user's behalf.

If successfully authenticated, OAuthAuthentication provides the following credentials.

request.user will be a django.contrib.auth.models.User instance.
request.auth will be a djangorestframework.models.OAuthToken instance.

SessionAuthentication

This policy 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 successfully authenticated, SessionAuthentication provides the following credentials.

request.user will be a django.contrib.auth.models.User instance.
request.auth will be None.

Custom authentication policies

To implement a custom authentication policy, 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.

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