I have a medium sized Drupal 6 site running (around 5 million page views per month and more than 30K registered users) and I need to integrate OSQA, a Django application, with it. I already have many users, roles and permissions in my Drupal database and I'd like to point the Django app to use the sign up and login pages I already have in Drupal to give my users a single point on entrance.
I want to keep the Django authentication part because I think OSQA would work better. I also have performance reasons in mind, the Drupal site already gets a lot of traffic and has a very busy database and I think that using a separate database for Django would help.
After some research I think I could make the Drupal sign up and login pages call Django in the background to sign up or login to the Django app. I plan to do this writing a couple of views in Django, one for sign up and another for login, and Drupal would post the username and password to those views. Of course I'd need to disable CSRF in Django for those views and probably also post some secret key that only my Drupal and Django applications know about to avoid external sites trying to use this "unprotected" Django views.
I know that my Django application may need some user data from Drupal at some points and I'm planning on using the Drupal services module for that.
Would this be a good approach? Any suggestions?
Thanks a lot!
Are there any plugins for OSQA to expose an authentication service that Drupal can talk to? (OpenID or similar).
Alternatively, check out Drupal's ldap_integration module for an example of a module that uses an external authentication service. Consider that you will need to create Drupal user accounts for each login.
Finally, why not just build the essential parts of OSQA's functionality with Drupal? Seems like the key functionality could be replicated quite easily using Taxonomy, Vote Up and Userpoints/User Badges... potentially easier to do than shared authentication, especially on a large site.
I once created a very simple [sql_authentication][1] module, which you can probably simply re-create for a more recent version of Drupal.
The idea is simple: provide Drupal with an alternative authentication callback.
In that callback-function, just check against the Django database, and return TRUE if you think the user is correct.
You could look at how openid.module (in core) extends the user-authentication for a simple example.
If you can post to the Django form, you may be able to use drupal_http_request to handle the call to Django. After using the ldap_integration module for a while, I worked on a custom authentication module that calls a Java-based REST authentication API using drupal_http_request. If you're interested in the code, let me know.
Related
I'm creating a basic Ember application. I am trying to set up a backend that stores posts. I would like to have a system where I can go to some admin site that has a form that has all the fields for a post that allows me to add, update, and delete posts. For example, if I have a Post model with attributes like Title, Contents, Date_created, and Image, I would like to have these fields in a form in some kind of admin site.
One example from a past tutorial I have done is the Django admin site. Is it possible to set up a Django backend for my Ember app? The Django admin is here: (scroll to bottom)
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/intro/tutorial02/
I know that asking how to set up a backend for my Ember application is a very general question, but I am confused as to where to start. I have already created a Post model with various attributes. I can create an Ember route that is a form to add a post, but then there comes authentication for that which I'm not really sure how to deal with either. That's why I came to Django because I remember they had a very nice admin site.
If it is not feasible to use Django to accomplish this, what are some other routes I can take to be able to get to some admin page where I can manipulate records and add new data to my website?
This is a pretty big question, but I feel your pain. Most tutorials are all, "so... just build out a rails app... or use all this long lost stubbing stuff... or here's a super outdated node server on github to use."
I would suggest breaking it down into pieces. Ember is really great, but–Yes–you need a backend. You could make a backend with Django(python), Rails(ruby), WordPress(PHP) + ember-wordpress, express or hapi(node), phoenix(elixir)- or really anything that will generate an API. You could also build an admin with Ember and then use that to send data to a service like parse or firebase. Those could get you an MVP while you learn more about how to build out a traditional back-end.
Django + http://www.django-rest-framework.org has a pretty great admin setup that builds out the admin and fields from your API specifications. I can see why people like it.
I would also mention, that ember-cli-mirage is great when you aren't sure what backend you'll have, but you need to have a mock-server to build off of.
If you can, choose something that will spit out an API with jsonAPI.
I would split this into 2 parts.
build out an Ember app with Mirage or some other temporary data.
build a back-end somehow.
Then you can connect them ~ without being stuck beforehand.
Good luck!
So pretty much a blog site where only person can create/delete/edit posts? If so then all you have to do is create a user with a predefined username and password in your Django app. You login through your Ember app. For this protected view you will need to use ember-simple-auth, which is the simplest way to implement something like this. Google ember-simple-auth and run its dummy app to see what they are doing.
I would like to have one users system (preferrably Django's) to rule both Django and Wordpress.
The use case is that Django is an application embedded inside a wordpress installation (via iframe or something similar). In order to use the Django, users must be authenticated, authentication in WordPress is not mandatory, but recommended (for posting comments and stuff like that).
In order to ease the usage of the site, I would like the same sign-up to apply for both the Django app and the WordPress installation. Sign-up might occur either via OAuth / FB authentication (lots of Django solutions for this), or via dedicated site users. While the signup process is most important, it would be nice if certain user fields would remain synced between the two worlds.
My thoughts on the matter:
Maybe there's an out-of-the-box solution (couldn't find any)
Create a full-fledged django app for syncing the two user models (wp_users and django's users) via one of the following options:
A master(django)-slave(wp) solution, where each change in Django changes info in the wp_users and other related tables and vice-versa (via Django periodically checking the DB or creating a WP plugin). Can be implemented either by putting both django and wp on the same (MySQL) db, using XML-RPC or some other anomination I didn't think of.
Same as above, but let WP be the master instead of Django (seems harder).
An external system to rule both models - maybe make OAuth / some other external authentication mandatory, and somehow sync the two models using this?
Has anyone encountered this situation before?
Any suggestions will be appreciated.
You should really try to work out some approach, revising your work when encountering problems afterwards.
Nevertheless imo Wordpress is kind of bordered. I wouldn't recommend making changes to both frameworks, but fixate on Django.
For example you could create a WordpressUser(User) and create a python script a crobjob, celery task or whatever you'll need to syncronize your databases. Meaning to say you should keep things strictly separated unless you have very good reasons not to (I can't think of any).
I'm hoping there's a straightforward answer to this question.
First, some history: I deployed a Django project and it uses all of the authentication mechanisms provided in Django. Namely, users are stored in auth_users and my login app validates against the records found in that table.
Now, I have a second, distinct Django project that needs to authenticate against the database from the original application. I'm not entirely sure how can I approach the problem, so I'm hoping someone in the stackoverflow community can help.
One thought was to add "myfirstproject.login" to the INSTALLED_APPS of the second project, but I'm uncertain if that's a viable option (CSRF issues?). Again, any insight is appreciated.
Try the sites module?
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/contrib/sites/
Create an auth backend?
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/topics/auth/#specifying-authentication-backends
Inherit from contrib.auth to create your own auth module?
CSRF would only be an issue if you were trying to authenticate by telling the client browser to ask the first site for auth; which is unlikely to be the best path to take.
I am tasked to create a web site using Django. It will be a 'sister' site to an existing Plone site. The same Apache instance will be the front end to the sites which allows me to use the same domain name.
However, the owners want the users to be able to log into one and still be logged into the other one.
How can this be accomplished?
Thanks! :)
Gut reaction is to use OAuth - see How to build a secure Django single signon between different sites?
Alternatively, have you tried this single sign-on app - http://code.google.com/p/django-sso/ ?
Also have a look on Django's documentation on how to implement your own authorization backend at http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#writing-an-authentication-backend
My gut reaction is to use LDAP. Plone's LDAP support is a little rough, but it works. Does Django have equivalent or better LDAP support? If so, then I think you are off and running…
You can move authentication to SQLPASPlugin and use the same table for Django and Plone.
There are two problems here, shared logins, and single sign on. LDAP or SQL based logins will give you the first, but you'll still have to enter your password in both sites. You need single sign on to remain logged in across bpth.
plone.session 3.0 (part of Plone 4, but compatible with Plone 3.3 if you also add hashlib to your buildout) is compatible with Apache mod_auth_tkt single sign on. It should be simple enough to configure Django to use Apache authentication, or if you're not running Apache, wrap plone.session's tktauth.py in a simple wsgi wrapper. Use the Plone site's require_login script as the TKTAuthLoginURL.
Need to integrate Django with an existing authentication system. That system has it's own database, API, login/logout,edit profile web pages and cookie.
(I may have to add a few additional profile fields stored/updated locally)
What's the proper approach to substitute the out-of-the-box authentication in Django?
The proper approach to substitute authentication from django's out-of-the-box to your own is to substitute your classes in the AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS tuple in settings.py as described in http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#specifying-authentication-backends. This is incredibly useful for just the issue you're describing.
A good example of an authentication backend done this way is django-cas. This uses CAS to authenticate in a django application. You can use this as your template and just write hooks into your own authentication system identically.
HTH
I've created a custom authentication backend when I've had to do something similar to what you have to do. See: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#writing-an-authentication-backend
In the authenticate function you call your api to authenticate the user, and then map them to a django.contrib.auth.model.User object on some primary key, like username for example. If the primary key is something other than username I usually create a mapping object, or put it into the profile object for the project.
This depends on how you want to handle the problem. If you don't need to keep the existing system running, your best bet is to import their data into the django project.
If the authentication system must stay in tact, you might have to write a wrapper for django.auth. I've done this in the past using SQLAlchemy http://www.sqlalchemy.org to integrate to the external database.
It might be helpful to take a look at the Django 1.2 multi-db support http://djangoadvent.com/1.2/multiple-database-support
In either case I'd try to get the user information into django.auth rather than to write your own authentication system.