Customizing authentication in Django¶

Specifying authentication backends¶

Behind the scenes, Django maintains a list of «authentication backends» that it checks for authentication. When somebody calls django.contrib.auth.authenticate() – as described in How to log a user in – Django tries authenticating across all of its authentication backends. If the first authentication method fails, Django tries the second one, and so on, until all backends have been attempted.

The list of authentication backends to use is specified in the AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS setting. This should be a list of Python path names that point to Python classes that know how to authenticate. These classes can be anywhere on your Python path.

By default, AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS is set to:

['django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend']

That’s the basic authentication backend that checks the Django users database and queries the built-in permissions. It does not provide protection against brute force attacks via any rate limiting mechanism. You may either implement your own rate limiting mechanism in a custom auth backend, or use the mechanisms provided by most Web servers.

The order of AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS matters, so if the same username and password is valid in multiple backends, Django will stop processing at the first positive match.

If a backend raises a PermissionDenied exception, authentication will immediately fail. Django won’t check the backends that follow.

Writing an authentication backend¶

An authentication backend is a class that implements two required methods: get_user(user_id) and authenticate(request, **credentials), as well as a set of optional permission related authorization methods.

The get_user method takes a user_id – which could be a username, database ID or whatever, but has to be the primary key of your user object – and returns a user object.

The authenticate method takes a request argument and credentials as keyword arguments. Most of the time, it’ll just look like this:

class MyBackend(object):
    def authenticate(self, request, username=None, password=None):
        # Check the username/password and return a user.
        ...

But it could also authenticate a token, like so:

class MyBackend(object):
    def authenticate(self, request, token=None):
        # Check the token and return a user.
        ...

Either way, authenticate() should check the credentials it gets and return a user object that matches those credentials if the credentials are valid. If they’re not valid, it should return None.

request is an HttpRequest and may be None if it wasn’t provided to authenticate() (which passes it on to the backend).

The Django admin is tightly coupled to the Django User object. The best way to deal with this is to create a Django User object for each user that exists for your backend (e.g., in your LDAP directory, your external SQL database, etc.) You can either write a script to do this in advance, or your authenticate method can do it the first time a user logs in.

Here’s an example backend that authenticates against a username and password variable defined in your settings.py file and creates a Django User object the first time a user authenticates:

from django.conf import settings
from django.contrib.auth.hashers import check_password
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class SettingsBackend(object):
    """
    Authenticate against the settings ADMIN_LOGIN and ADMIN_PASSWORD.

    Use the login name and a hash of the password. For example:

    ADMIN_LOGIN = 'admin'
    ADMIN_PASSWORD = 'pbkdf2_sha256$30000$Vo0VlMnkR4Bk$qEvtdyZRWTcOsCnI/oQ7fVOu1XAURIZYoOZ3iq8Dr4M='
    """

    def authenticate(self, request, username=None, password=None):
        login_valid = (settings.ADMIN_LOGIN == username)
        pwd_valid = check_password(password, settings.ADMIN_PASSWORD)
        if login_valid and pwd_valid:
            try:
                user = User.objects.get(username=username)
            except User.DoesNotExist:
                # Create a new user. There's no need to set a password
                # because only the password from settings.py is checked.
                user = User(username=username)
                user.is_staff = True
                user.is_superuser = True
                user.save()
            return user
        return None

    def get_user(self, user_id):
        try:
            return User.objects.get(pk=user_id)
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return None

Handling authorization in custom backends¶

Custom auth backends can provide their own permissions.

The user model will delegate permission lookup functions (get_group_permissions(), get_all_permissions(), has_perm(), and has_module_perms()) to any authentication backend that implements these functions.

The permissions given to the user will be the superset of all permissions returned by all backends. That is, Django grants a permission to a user that any one backend grants.

If a backend raises a PermissionDenied exception in has_perm() or has_module_perms(), the authorization will immediately fail and Django won’t check the backends that follow.

The simple backend above could implement permissions for the magic admin fairly simply:

class SettingsBackend(object):
    ...
    def has_perm(self, user_obj, perm, obj=None):
        return user_obj.username == settings.ADMIN_LOGIN

This gives full permissions to the user granted access in the above example. Notice that in addition to the same arguments given to the associated django.contrib.auth.models.User functions, the backend auth functions all take the user object, which may be an anonymous user, as an argument.

A full authorization implementation can be found in the ModelBackend class in django/contrib/auth/backends.py, which is the default backend and queries the auth_permission table most of the time. If you wish to provide custom behavior for only part of the backend API, you can take advantage of Python inheritance and subclass ModelBackend instead of implementing the complete API in a custom backend.

Using a custom user model when starting a project¶

If you’re starting a new project, it’s highly recommended to set up a custom user model, even if the default User model is sufficient for you. This model behaves identically to the default user model, but you’ll be able to customize it in the future if the need arises:

from django.contrib.auth.models import AbstractUser

class User(AbstractUser):
    pass

Don’t forget to point AUTH_USER_MODEL to it. Do this before creating any migrations or running manage.py migrate for the first time.

Also, register the model in the app’s admin.py:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.contrib.auth.admin import UserAdmin
from .models import User

admin.site.register(User, UserAdmin)

Changing to a custom user model mid-project¶

Changing AUTH_USER_MODEL after you’ve created database tables is significantly more difficult since it affects foreign keys and many-to-many relationships, for example.

This change can’t be done automatically and requires manually fixing your schema, moving your data from the old user table, and possibly manually reapplying some migrations. See #25313 for an outline of the steps.

Due to limitations of Django’s dynamic dependency feature for swappable models, the model referenced by AUTH_USER_MODEL must be created in the first migration of its app (usually called 0001_initial); otherwise, you’ll have dependency issues.

In addition, you may run into a CircularDependencyError when running your migrations as Django won’t be able to automatically break the dependency loop due to the dynamic dependency. If you see this error, you should break the loop by moving the models depended on by your user model into a second migration. (You can try making two normal models that have a ForeignKey to each other and seeing how makemigrations resolves that circular dependency if you want to see how it’s usually done.)

Reusable apps and AUTH_USER_MODEL¶

Reusable apps shouldn’t implement a custom user model. A project may use many apps, and two reusable apps that implemented a custom user model couldn’t be used together. If you need to store per user information in your app, use a ForeignKey or OneToOneField to settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL as described below.

Referencing the User model¶

If you reference User directly (for example, by referring to it in a foreign key), your code will not work in projects where the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting has been changed to a different user model.

get_user_model()[πηγή]¶

Instead of referring to User directly, you should reference the user model using django.contrib.auth.get_user_model(). This method will return the currently active user model – the custom user model if one is specified, or User otherwise.

When you define a foreign key or many-to-many relations to the user model, you should specify the custom model using the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting. For example:

from django.conf import settings
from django.db import models

class Article(models.Model):
    author = models.ForeignKey(
        settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL,
        on_delete=models.CASCADE,
    )

When connecting to signals sent by the user model, you should specify the custom model using the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting. For example:

from django.conf import settings
from django.db.models.signals import post_save

def post_save_receiver(sender, instance, created, **kwargs):
    pass

post_save.connect(post_save_receiver, sender=settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL)

Generally speaking, it’s easiest to refer to the user model with the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting in code that’s executed at import time, however, it’s also possible to call get_user_model() while Django is importing models, so you could use models.ForeignKey(get_user_model(), ...).

If your app is tested with multiple user models, using @override_settings(AUTH_USER_MODEL=...) for example, and you cache the result of get_user_model() in a module-level variable, you may need to listen to the setting_changed signal to clear the cache. For example:

from django.apps import apps
from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model
from django.core.signals import setting_changed
from django.dispatch import receiver

@receiver(setting_changed)
def user_model_swapped(**kwargs):
    if kwargs['setting'] == 'AUTH_USER_MODEL':
        apps.clear_cache()
        from myapp import some_module
        some_module.UserModel = get_user_model()

Changed in Django 1.11:

The ability to call get_user_model() at import time was added.

Specifying a custom user model¶

Django expects your custom user model to meet some minimum requirements.

1. If you use the default authentication backend, then your model must have a single unique field that can be used for identification purposes. This can be a username, an email address, or any other unique attribute. A non-unique username field is allowed if you use a custom authentication backend that can support it.
2. Your model must provide a way to address the user in a «short» and «long» form. The most common interpretation of this would be to use the user’s given name as the «short» identifier, and the user’s full name as the «long» identifier. However, there are no constraints on what these two methods return - if you want, they can return exactly the same value.

The easiest way to construct a compliant custom user model is to inherit from AbstractBaseUser. AbstractBaseUser provides the core implementation of a user model, including hashed passwords and tokenized password resets. You must then provide some key implementation details:

class models.CustomUser¶

USERNAME_FIELD¶

A string describing the name of the field on the user model that is used as the unique identifier. This will usually be a username of some kind, but it can also be an email address, or any other unique identifier. The field must be unique (i.e., have unique=True set in its definition), unless you use a custom authentication backend that can support non-unique usernames.

In the following example, the field identifier is used as the identifying field:

class MyUser(AbstractBaseUser):
    identifier = models.CharField(max_length=40, unique=True)
    ...
    USERNAME_FIELD = 'identifier'

USERNAME_FIELD now supports ForeignKeys. Since there is no way to pass model instances during the createsuperuser prompt, expect the user to enter the value of to_field value (the primary_key by default) of an existing instance.

EMAIL_FIELD¶

New in Django 1.11.

A string describing the name of the email field on the User model. This value is returned by get_email_field_name().

REQUIRED_FIELDS¶

A list of the field names that will be prompted for when creating a user via the createsuperuser management command. The user will be prompted to supply a value for each of these fields. It must include any field for which blank is False or undefined and may include additional fields you want prompted for when a user is created interactively. REQUIRED_FIELDS has no effect in other parts of Django, like creating a user in the admin.

For example, here is the partial definition for a user model that defines two required fields - a date of birth and height:

class MyUser(AbstractBaseUser):
    ...
    date_of_birth = models.DateField()
    height = models.FloatField()
    ...
    REQUIRED_FIELDS = ['date_of_birth', 'height']

Σημείωση

REQUIRED_FIELDS must contain all required fields on your user model, but should not contain the USERNAME_FIELD or password as these fields will always be prompted for.

REQUIRED_FIELDS now supports ForeignKeys. Since there is no way to pass model instances during the createsuperuser prompt, expect the user to enter the value of to_field value (the primary_key by default) of an existing instance.

is_active¶

A boolean attribute that indicates whether the user is considered «active». This attribute is provided as an attribute on AbstractBaseUser defaulting to True. How you choose to implement it will depend on the details of your chosen auth backends. See the documentation of the is_active attribute on the built-in user model for details.

get_full_name()¶

A longer formal identifier for the user. A common interpretation would be the full name of the user, but it can be any string that identifies the user.

get_short_name()¶

A short, informal identifier for the user. A common interpretation would be the first name of the user, but it can be any string that identifies the user in an informal way. It may also return the same value as django.contrib.auth.models.User.get_full_name().

Importing AbstractBaseUser

AbstractBaseUser and BaseUserManager are importable from django.contrib.auth.base_user so that they can be imported without including django.contrib.auth in INSTALLED_APPS.

The following attributes and methods are available on any subclass of AbstractBaseUser:

class models.AbstractBaseUser¶

get_username()¶

Returns the value of the field nominated by USERNAME_FIELD.

clean()¶

New in Django 1.10.

Normalizes the username by calling normalize_username(). If you override this method, be sure to call super() to retain the normalization.

classmethod get_email_field_name()¶

New in Django 1.11.

Returns the name of the email field specified by the EMAIL_FIELD attribute. Defaults to 'email' if EMAIL_FIELD isn’t specified.

classmethod normalize_username(username)¶

New in Django 1.10.

Applies NFKC Unicode normalization to usernames so that visually identical characters with different Unicode code points are considered identical.

is_authenticated¶

Read-only attribute which is always True (as opposed to AnonymousUser.is_authenticated which is always False). This is a way to tell if the user has been authenticated. This does not imply any permissions and doesn’t check if the user is active or has a valid session. Even though normally you will check this attribute on request.user to find out whether it has been populated by the AuthenticationMiddleware (representing the currently logged-in user), you should know this attribute is True for any User instance.

Changed in Django 1.10:

In older versions, this was a method. Backwards-compatibility support for using it as a method will be removed in Django 2.0.

is_anonymous¶

Read-only attribute which is always False. This is a way of differentiating User and AnonymousUser objects. Generally, you should prefer using is_authenticated to this attribute.

Changed in Django 1.10:

In older versions, this was a method. Backwards-compatibility support for using it as a method will be removed in Django 2.0.

set_password(raw_password)¶

Sets the user’s password to the given raw string, taking care of the password hashing. Doesn’t save the AbstractBaseUser object.

When the raw_password is None, the password will be set to an unusable password, as if set_unusable_password() were used.

check_password(raw_password)¶

Returns True if the given raw string is the correct password for the user. (This takes care of the password hashing in making the comparison.)

set_unusable_password()¶

Marks the user as having no password set. This isn’t the same as having a blank string for a password. check_password() for this user will never return True. Doesn’t save the AbstractBaseUser object.

You may need this if authentication for your application takes place against an existing external source such as an LDAP directory.

has_usable_password()¶

Returns False if set_unusable_password() has been called for this user.

get_session_auth_hash()¶

Returns an HMAC of the password field. Used for Session invalidation on password change.

AbstractUser subclasses AbstractBaseUser:

class models.AbstractUser¶

clean()¶

New in Django 1.11.

Normalizes the email by calling BaseUserManager.normalize_email(). If you override this method, be sure to call super() to retain the normalization.

You should also define a custom manager for your user model. If your user model defines username, email, is_staff, is_active, is_superuser, last_login, and date_joined fields the same as Django’s default user, you can just install Django’s UserManager; however, if your user model defines different fields, you’ll need to define a custom manager that extends BaseUserManager providing two additional methods:

class models.CustomUserManager¶

create_user(*username_field*, password=None, **other_fields)¶

The prototype of create_user() should accept the username field, plus all required fields as arguments. For example, if your user model uses email as the username field, and has date_of_birth as a required field, then create_user should be defined as:

def create_user(self, email, date_of_birth, password=None):
    # create user here
    ...

create_superuser(*username_field*, password, **other_fields)¶

The prototype of create_superuser() should accept the username field, plus all required fields as arguments. For example, if your user model uses email as the username field, and has date_of_birth as a required field, then create_superuser should be defined as:

def create_superuser(self, email, date_of_birth, password):
    # create superuser here
    ...

Unlike create_user(), create_superuser() must require the caller to provide a password.

BaseUserManager provides the following utility methods:

class models.BaseUserManager¶

classmethod normalize_email(email)¶

Normalizes email addresses by lowercasing the domain portion of the email address.

get_by_natural_key(username)¶

Retrieves a user instance using the contents of the field nominated by USERNAME_FIELD.

make_random_password(length=10, allowed_chars='abcdefghjkmnpqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ23456789')¶

Returns a random password with the given length and given string of allowed characters. Note that the default value of allowed_chars doesn’t contain letters that can cause user confusion, including:

• i, l, I, and 1 (lowercase letter i, lowercase letter L, uppercase letter i, and the number one)
• o, O, and 0 (lowercase letter o, uppercase letter o, and zero)

Extending Django’s default User¶

If you’re entirely happy with Django’s User model and you just want to add some additional profile information, you could simply subclass django.contrib.auth.models.AbstractUser and add your custom profile fields, although we’d recommend a separate model as described in the «Model design considerations» note of Specifying a custom user model. AbstractUser provides the full implementation of the default User as an abstract model.

Custom users and the built-in auth forms¶

Django’s built-in forms and views make certain assumptions about the user model that they are working with.

The following forms are compatible with any subclass of AbstractBaseUser:

• AuthenticationForm: Uses the username field specified by USERNAME_FIELD.
• SetPasswordForm
• PasswordChangeForm
• AdminPasswordChangeForm

The following forms make assumptions about the user model and can be used as-is if those assumptions are met:

• PasswordResetForm: Assumes that the user model has a field that stores the user’s email address with the name returned by get_email_field_name() (email by default) that can be used to identify the user and a boolean field named is_active to prevent password resets for inactive users.

Finally, the following forms are tied to User and need to be rewritten or extended to work with a custom user model:

• UserCreationForm
• UserChangeForm

If your custom user model is a simple subclass of AbstractUser, then you can extend these forms in this manner:

from django.contrib.auth.forms import UserCreationForm
from myapp.models import CustomUser

class CustomUserCreationForm(UserCreationForm):

    class Meta(UserCreationForm.Meta):
        model = CustomUser
        fields = UserCreationForm.Meta.fields + ('custom_field',)

Custom users and django.contrib.admin¶

If you want your custom user model to also work with the admin, your user model must define some additional attributes and methods. These methods allow the admin to control access of the user to admin content:

class models.CustomUser

is_staff¶

Returns True if the user is allowed to have access to the admin site.

is_active¶

Returns True if the user account is currently active.

has_perm(perm, obj=None):

Returns True if the user has the named permission. If obj is provided, the permission needs to be checked against a specific object instance.

has_module_perms(app_label):

Returns True if the user has permission to access models in the given app.

You will also need to register your custom user model with the admin. If your custom user model extends django.contrib.auth.models.AbstractUser, you can use Django’s existing django.contrib.auth.admin.UserAdmin class. However, if your user model extends AbstractBaseUser, you’ll need to define a custom ModelAdmin class. It may be possible to subclass the default django.contrib.auth.admin.UserAdmin; however, you’ll need to override any of the definitions that refer to fields on django.contrib.auth.models.AbstractUser that aren’t on your custom user class.

Custom users and permissions¶

To make it easy to include Django’s permission framework into your own user class, Django provides PermissionsMixin. This is an abstract model you can include in the class hierarchy for your user model, giving you all the methods and database fields necessary to support Django’s permission model.

PermissionsMixin provides the following methods and attributes:

class models.PermissionsMixin¶

is_superuser¶

Boolean. Designates that this user has all permissions without explicitly assigning them.

get_group_permissions(obj=None)¶

Returns a set of permission strings that the user has, through their groups.

If obj is passed in, only returns the group permissions for this specific object.

get_all_permissions(obj=None)¶

Returns a set of permission strings that the user has, both through group and user permissions.

If obj is passed in, only returns the permissions for this specific object.

has_perm(perm, obj=None)¶

Returns True if the user has the specified permission, where perm is in the format "<app label>.<permission codename>" (see permissions). If the user is inactive, this method will always return False.

If obj is passed in, this method won’t check for a permission for the model, but for this specific object.

has_perms(perm_list, obj=None)¶

Returns True if the user has each of the specified permissions, where each perm is in the format "<app label>.<permission codename>". If the user is inactive, this method will always return False.

If obj is passed in, this method won’t check for permissions for the model, but for the specific object.

has_module_perms(package_name)¶

Returns True if the user has any permissions in the given package (the Django app label). If the user is inactive, this method will always return False.

Custom users and proxy models¶

One limitation of custom user models is that installing a custom user model will break any proxy model extending User. Proxy models must be based on a concrete base class; by defining a custom user model, you remove the ability of Django to reliably identify the base class.

If your project uses proxy models, you must either modify the proxy to extend the user model that’s in use in your project, or merge your proxy’s behavior into your User subclass.

A full example¶

Here is an example of an admin-compliant custom user app. This user model uses an email address as the username, and has a required date of birth; it provides no permission checking, beyond a simple admin flag on the user account. This model would be compatible with all the built-in auth forms and views, except for the user creation forms. This example illustrates how most of the components work together, but is not intended to be copied directly into projects for production use.

This code would all live in a models.py file for a custom authentication app:

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import (
    BaseUserManager, AbstractBaseUser
)


class MyUserManager(BaseUserManager):
    def create_user(self, email, date_of_birth, password=None):
        """
        Creates and saves a User with the given email, date of
        birth and password.
        """
        if not email:
            raise ValueError('Users must have an email address')

        user = self.model(
            email=self.normalize_email(email),
            date_of_birth=date_of_birth,
        )

        user.set_password(password)
        user.save(using=self._db)
        return user

    def create_superuser(self, email, date_of_birth, password):
        """
        Creates and saves a superuser with the given email, date of
        birth and password.
        """
        user = self.create_user(
            email,
            password=password,
            date_of_birth=date_of_birth,
        )
        user.is_admin = True
        user.save(using=self._db)
        return user


class MyUser(AbstractBaseUser):
    email = models.EmailField(
        verbose_name='email address',
        max_length=255,
        unique=True,
    )
    date_of_birth = models.DateField()
    is_active = models.BooleanField(default=True)
    is_admin = models.BooleanField(default=False)

    objects = MyUserManager()

    USERNAME_FIELD = 'email'
    REQUIRED_FIELDS = ['date_of_birth']

    def get_full_name(self):
        # The user is identified by their email address
        return self.email

    def get_short_name(self):
        # The user is identified by their email address
        return self.email

    def __str__(self):              # __unicode__ on Python 2
        return self.email

    def has_perm(self, perm, obj=None):
        "Does the user have a specific permission?"
        # Simplest possible answer: Yes, always
        return True

    def has_module_perms(self, app_label):
        "Does the user have permissions to view the app `app_label`?"
        # Simplest possible answer: Yes, always
        return True

    @property
    def is_staff(self):
        "Is the user a member of staff?"
        # Simplest possible answer: All admins are staff
        return self.is_admin

Then, to register this custom user model with Django’s admin, the following code would be required in the app’s admin.py file:

from django import forms
from django.contrib import admin
from django.contrib.auth.models import Group
from django.contrib.auth.admin import UserAdmin as BaseUserAdmin
from django.contrib.auth.forms import ReadOnlyPasswordHashField

from customauth.models import MyUser


class UserCreationForm(forms.ModelForm):
    """A form for creating new users. Includes all the required
    fields, plus a repeated password."""
    password1 = forms.CharField(label='Password', widget=forms.PasswordInput)
    password2 = forms.CharField(label='Password confirmation', widget=forms.PasswordInput)

    class Meta:
        model = MyUser
        fields = ('email', 'date_of_birth')

    def clean_password2(self):
        # Check that the two password entries match
        password1 = self.cleaned_data.get("password1")
        password2 = self.cleaned_data.get("password2")
        if password1 and password2 and password1 != password2:
            raise forms.ValidationError("Passwords don't match")
        return password2

    def save(self, commit=True):
        # Save the provided password in hashed format
        user = super(UserCreationForm, self).save(commit=False)
        user.set_password(self.cleaned_data["password1"])
        if commit:
            user.save()
        return user


class UserChangeForm(forms.ModelForm):
    """A form for updating users. Includes all the fields on
    the user, but replaces the password field with admin's
    password hash display field.
    """
    password = ReadOnlyPasswordHashField()

    class Meta:
        model = MyUser
        fields = ('email', 'password', 'date_of_birth', 'is_active', 'is_admin')

    def clean_password(self):
        # Regardless of what the user provides, return the initial value.
        # This is done here, rather than on the field, because the
        # field does not have access to the initial value
        return self.initial["password"]


class UserAdmin(BaseUserAdmin):
    # The forms to add and change user instances
    form = UserChangeForm
    add_form = UserCreationForm

    # The fields to be used in displaying the User model.
    # These override the definitions on the base UserAdmin
    # that reference specific fields on auth.User.
    list_display = ('email', 'date_of_birth', 'is_admin')
    list_filter = ('is_admin',)
    fieldsets = (
        (None, {'fields': ('email', 'password')}),
        ('Personal info', {'fields': ('date_of_birth',)}),
        ('Permissions', {'fields': ('is_admin',)}),
    )
    # add_fieldsets is not a standard ModelAdmin attribute. UserAdmin
    # overrides get_fieldsets to use this attribute when creating a user.
    add_fieldsets = (
        (None, {
            'classes': ('wide',),
            'fields': ('email', 'date_of_birth', 'password1', 'password2')}
        ),
    )
    search_fields = ('email',)
    ordering = ('email',)
    filter_horizontal = ()

# Now register the new UserAdmin...
admin.site.register(MyUser, UserAdmin)
# ... and, since we're not using Django's built-in permissions,
# unregister the Group model from admin.
admin.site.unregister(Group)

Finally, specify the custom model as the default user model for your project using the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting in your settings.py:

AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'customauth.MyUser'