django-rest-framework/docs/api-guide/authentication.md

Authentication

Auth needs to be pluggable.

— Jacob Kaplan-Moss, "REST worst practices"

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 schemes out of the box, and also allows you to implement custom schemes.

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.user property will typically be set to an instance of the contrib.auth package's User class.

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.

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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.

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How authentication is determined

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.

Setting the authentication scheme

The default authentication schemes may be set globally, using the DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION setting. For example.

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.authentication.BasicAuthentication',
        'rest_framework.authentication.SessionAuthentication',
    )
}

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

class ExampleView(APIView):
    authentication_classes = (SessionAuthentication, BasicAuthentication)
    permission_classes = (IsAuthenticated,)

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

Unauthorized and Forbidden responses

When an unauthenticated request is denied permission there are two different error codes that may be appropriate.

• HTTP 401 Unauthorized
• HTTP 403 Permission Denied

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.

Apache mod_wsgi specific configuration

Note that if deploying to Apache using mod_wsgi, 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 can go in either server config, virtual host, directory or .htaccess 
WSGIPassAuthorization On

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API Reference

BasicAuthentication

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

If successfully authenticated, BasicAuthentication provides the following credentials.

• request.user will be a Django User instance.
• request.auth will be None.

Unauthenticated responses that are denied permission will result in an HTTP 401 Unauthorized response with an appropriate WWW-Authenticate header. For example:

WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="api"

Note: If you use BasicAuthentication in production you must ensure that your API is only available over https only. 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.

TokenAuthentication

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, include rest_framework.authtoken in your INSTALLED_APPS setting:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'rest_framework.authtoken'
)

You'll also need to create tokens for your users.

from rest_framework.authtoken.models import Token

token = Token.objects.create(user=...)
print token.key

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:

Authorization: Token 9944b09199c62bcf9418ad846dd0e4bbdfc6ee4b

If successfully authenticated, TokenAuthentication provides the following credentials.

• request.user will be a Django User instance.
• request.auth will be a rest_framework.authtoken.models.BasicToken instance.

Unauthenticated responses that are denied permission will result in an HTTP 401 Unauthorized response with an appropriate WWW-Authenticate header. For example:

WWW-Authenticate: Token

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Note: If you use TokenAuthentication in production you must ensure that your API is only available over https only.

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Generating Tokens

If you want every user to have an automatically generated Token, you can simply catch the User's post_save signal.

@receiver(post_save, sender=User)
def create_auth_token(sender, instance=None, created=False, **kwargs):
    if created:
        Token.objects.create(user=instance)

If you've already created some users, you can generate tokens for all existing users like this:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from rest_framework.authtoken.models import Token

for user in User.objects.all():
    Token.objects.get_or_create(user=user)

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:

urlpatterns += patterns('',
    url(r'^api-token-auth/', 'rest_framework.authtoken.views.obtain_auth_token')
)

Note that the URL part of the pattern can be whatever you want to use.

The obtain_auth_token view will return a JSON response when valid username and password fields are POSTed to the view using form data or JSON:

{ 'token' : '9944b09199c62bcf9418ad846dd0e4bbdfc6ee4b' }

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.

Custom user models

The rest_framework.authtoken app includes a south migration that will create the authtoken table. If you're using a 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.

You can do so by inserting a needed_by attribute in your user migration:

class Migration:

    needed_by = (
        ('authtoken', '0001_initial'),
    )
    
    def forwards(self):
        ...

For more details, see the south documentation on dependencies.

SessionAuthentication

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 successfully authenticated, SessionAuthentication provides the following credentials.

• request.user will be a Django User instance.
• request.auth will be None.

Unauthenticated responses that are denied permission will result in an HTTP 403 Forbidden response.

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 for more details.

Custom authentication

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.

In some circumstances instead of returning None, you may want to raise an AuthenticationFailed exception from the .authenticate() method.

Typically the approach you should take is:

• If authentication is not attempted, return None. Any other authentication schemes also in use will still be checked.
• 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.

Example

The following example will authenticate any incoming request as the user given by the username in a custom request header named 'X_USERNAME'.

class ExampleAuthentication(authentication.BaseAuthentication):
    def authenticate(self, request):
        username = request.META.get('X_USERNAME')
        if not username:
            return None

        try:
            user = User.objects.get(username=username)
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            raise authenticate.AuthenticationFailed('No such user')
        
        return (user, None)

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Third party packages

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 maintains the djangorestframework-digestauth package which provides HTTP digest authentication support for REST framework.