django1.8 api - how to authenticate with a key - django

Question

I want to allow the django users to use a key in the api urls for authentication.
I do not have OAUTH set up yet so I guess the key could be a sesion key or a digest key.
I'm having 2 problems.
I've tried sending this request:
http://192.166.166.11:8000/api?task=search&term=115&csrf_token=s69WAIZqlCTur1XZQr72QhCc7fzqaRtM
First of all, I've tried using the csrf_token but it does not work.
It takes me to the login page.
Secondly, I do not know how to retrieve csrf_token of other users (the admin is trying to get their csrf_tokens).
My attempt:
x = User.objects.get(username='someone')
x.get_session_auth_hash()
gives me the user's authentication hash but it is a different value.
Can someone please guide me get these two problems sorted out?

Answer 1

You are creating a token-based authentication. You already mentioned OAUTH as one option, and I strongly recommend using one of the existing implementations like django-oauth-toolkit. However, you can also create your own quick solution to create a token-based authentication.
Disclaimer: This is for demo purposes only. Do not copy it in any existing project. It will make your application vulnerable.
First, we create an additional model handling the authentication tokens:
/auth_tokens/models.py
from django.db import models
from django.conf import settings
import string, random
def random_string(length = 64, chars=string.ascii_uppercase + string.ascii_lowercase + string.digits):
return ''.join(random.choice(chars) for x in range(length))
class AuthToken(models.Model):
user = models.ForeignKey(settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL)
token = models.CharField(max_length=64, default=random_string)
/auth_tokens/middleware.py
from auth_tokens.models import AuthToken
class AuthTokenMiddleware:
def process_request(self, request):
token = request.GET.get('auth', None)
if not token:
return
token = AuthToken.objects.get(token=token)
request.user = token.user
return request
Including the middleware into your settings.MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES should enable you to add ?token=<token> to your URL to login your users.

Answer 2

I ended up using token authentication:
http://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/authentication/
so I'd like to share the workflow.
First, you need to do the set up. In settings.py, modify INSTALLED_APPS and add REST_FRAMEWORK as in documentation.
Then you need to run python manage.py syncdb because it needs to add some tables.
Then, you need to add some urls to urls.py to route the api.
You can create and retrieve tokens using this code:
from rest_framework.authtoken.models import Token
token = Token.objects.create(user=User.objects.get(username='john'))
print token.key
Lastly, you'll have to modify your view which depends on whether you're using a function based or class based view.
Here is a function based view I used:
from rest_framework.authentication import TokenAuthentication
from rest_framework.permissions import IsAuthenticated
from rest_framework.response import Response
from rest_framework.views import APIView
from rest_framework.decorators import authentication_classes, permission_classes
from rest_framework.decorators import api_view
#api_view(['GET', 'POST'])
#authentication_classes((TokenAuthentication,))
#permission_classes((IsAuthenticated,))
#login_required
def mybooks(request):
entries = Book.objects.all()
return render(request, 'mybooks.html', {'entries': entries})
Lastly, to test it out:
import requests
token = '243124c52f7583e320d043c4395bd99f63344035'
headers = {'Authorization' : 'Token {}'.format(token)}
page = requests.post('http://127.0.0.1:8000/mybooks/', headers=headers)
print page.content
Note that in my case I do not need define plain serialization since I have an advanced custom serialization and that is not the topic here.

Answer 3

Django doesn't provide API Keys out of the box.
Use API providers such as Tastypie to have this feature