Get DRF token from python-social-auth backend - django

Question

I am trying to integrate Social Authentication in my DRF backend. I decided to go with python-social-auth. If I serve my social login through Django (and an HTML view), I can see my login in successful. I also figured that I can redirect after successful social authentication as outlined here.
Until now, my frontend (a Nuxt app) was using DRF tokens. Even though:
I can create valid tokens for social accounts.
My frontend can redirect the users to -> complete authorization with OAuth sites e.g. Google, Twitter -> return back to the frontend.
Is it possible for me to somehow manage to redirect a successfully authenticated user to the frontend with the associated and valid DRF token as a query parameter?

Answer 1

You can, it's not trivial, tho. It's possible because the mechanism to retrieve URLs (success or errors ones) is delegated to strategies setting() method, which in the end invokes get_setting() on final implementations. This method you can override to add your custom logic.
These steps should get you on the road:
Define a custom strategy
from social_django.strategy import DjangoStrategy
class CustomStrategy(DjangoStrategy):
def get_setting(self, name):
if name == 'LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL':
token = get_drf_token()
return f'/?toke={token}'
else:
return super().get_setting(name)
Point your SOCIAL_AUTH_STRATEGY settings to this new strategy (import path syntax)

Answer 2

Besides using a custom strategy, which I believe is more the library's style, there is another explicit solution:
Since python-social-auth allows redirection after successful authentication, open another endpoint that will a. generate a token b. redirect to the frontend. So I defined follow api_view:
#api_view(http_method_names=['get'])
def user_token(request):
if request.user.is_authenticated:
token, e = Token.objects.get_or_create(user=request.user)
return redirect('<front-end>/?token='+token.key)
else:
return redirect(`<front-end>/login/?error=true')
Now a potential authentication flow is like this:
User visits front-end -> Click 'login using Github et.al.' -> Login at the third party (say, Github) -> Back to backend /success/ -> redirect to front-end url (based on the above view) with the token -> Handle the query parameter on the frontend (which is pretty trivial in my case where I am using Nuxt).
If we mount user_token at path /success/token/, then once the user visits: http:<backend>:/login/github/?next=/success/token/, every right step on users part will take him/her to the front-end with the query param token set as the right token.
UPDATE: This will only work if DRF has session authentication active, otherwise request.user.is_authenticated can never be true.