Authentication

Authentication is the component needed to verify who a certain user is and to validate their access to the API.

Authentication answers the question “Who is this person?” This usually involves requiring credentials, such as an API key or username/password or oAuth tokens.

Usage

Using these classes is simple. Simply provide them (or your own class) as a Meta option to the Resource in question. For example:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from tastypie.authentication import BasicAuthentication
from tastypie.resources import ModelResource


class UserResource(ModelResource):
    class Meta:
        queryset = User.objects.all()
        resource_name = 'auth/user'
        excludes = ['email', 'password', 'is_superuser']
        # Add it here.
        authentication = BasicAuthentication()

Authentication Options

Tastypie ships with the following Authentication classes:

Authentication

The no-op authentication option, the client is always allowed through. Very useful for development and read-only APIs.

BasicAuthentication

This authentication scheme uses HTTP Basic Auth to check a user’s credentials. The username is their django.contrib.auth.models.User username (assuming it is present) and their password should also correspond to that entry.

Warning

If you’re using Apache & mod_wsgi, you will need to enable WSGIPassAuthorization On. See this post for details.

ApiKeyAuthentication

As an alternative to requiring sensitive data like a password, the ApiKeyAuthentication allows you to collect just username & a machine-generated api key. Tastypie ships with a special Model just for this purpose, so you’ll need to ensure tastypie is in INSTALLED_APPS and that the model’s database tables have been created (e.g. via django-admin.py syncdb).

To use this mechanism, the end user can either specify an Authorization header or pass the username/api_key combination as GET/POST parameters. Examples:

# As a header
# Format is ``Authorization: ApiKey <username>:<api_key>
Authorization: ApiKey daniel:204db7bcfafb2deb7506b89eb3b9b715b09905c8

# As GET params
http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/v1/entries/?username=daniel&api_key=204db7bcfafb2deb7506b89eb3b9b715b09905c8

Tastypie includes a signal function you can use to auto-create ApiKey objects. Hooking it up looks like:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.db.models import signals
from tastypie.models import create_api_key

signals.post_save.connect(create_api_key, sender=User)

Warning

If you’re using Apache & mod_wsgi, you will need to enable WSGIPassAuthorization On, otherwise mod_wsgi strips out the Authorization header. See this post for details (even though it only mentions Basic auth).

Note

In some cases it may be useful to make the ApiKey model an abstract base class. To enable this, set settings.TASTYPIE_ABSTRACT_APIKEY to True. See the documentation for this setting for more information.

SessionAuthentication

This authentication scheme uses the built-in Django sessions to check if a user is logged. This is typically useful when used by Javascript on the same site as the API is hosted on.

It requires that the user has logged in & has an active session. They also must have a valid CSRF token.

DigestAuthentication

This authentication scheme uses HTTP Digest Auth to check a user’s credentials. The username is their django.contrib.auth.models.User username (assuming it is present) and their password should be their machine-generated api key. As with ApiKeyAuthentication, tastypie should be included in INSTALLED_APPS.

Warning

If you’re using Apache & mod_wsgi, you will need to enable WSGIPassAuthorization On. See this post for details (even though it only mentions Basic auth).

OAuthAuthentication

Handles OAuth, which checks a user’s credentials against a separate service. Currently verifies against OAuth 1.0a services.

This does NOT provide OAuth authentication in your API, strictly consumption.

Warning

If you’re used to in-browser OAuth flow (click a “Sign In” button, get redirected, login on remote service, get redirected back), this isn’t the same. Most prominently, expecting that would cause API clients to have to use tools like mechanize to fill in forms, which would be difficult.

This authentication expects that you’re already followed some sort of OAuth flow & that the credentials (Nonce/token/etc) are simply being passed to it. It merely checks that the credentials are valid. No requests are made to remote services as part of this authentication class.

MultiAuthentication

This authentication class actually wraps any number of other authentication classes, attempting each until successfully authenticating. For example:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from tastypie.authentication import BasicAuthentication, ApiKeyAuthentication, MultiAuthentication
from tastypie.authorization import DjangoAuthorization
from tastypie.resources import ModelResource

class UserResource(ModelResource):
    class Meta:
        queryset = User.objects.all()
        resource_name = 'auth/user'
        excludes = ['email', 'password', 'is_superuser']

        authentication = MultiAuthentication(BasicAuthentication(), ApiKeyAuthentication())
        authorization = DjangoAuthorization()

In the case of an authentication returning a customized HttpUnauthorized, MultiAuthentication defaults to the first returned one. Authentication schemes that need to control the response, such as the included BasicAuthentication and DigestAuthentication, should be placed first.

Implementing Your Own Authentication/Authorization

Implementing your own Authentication classes is a simple process. Authentication has two methods to override (one of which is optional but recommended to be customized):

from tastypie.authentication import Authentication


class SillyAuthentication(Authentication):
    def is_authenticated(self, request, **kwargs):
        if 'daniel' in request.user.username:
          return True

        return False

    # Optional but recommended
    def get_identifier(self, request):
        return request.user.username

Under this scheme, only users with ‘daniel’ in their username will be allowed in.