Are sessions needed for python-social-auth

Question

I\'m building a django app with an API backend(built with DRF) and angularjs client. My goal is to completely decouple the server and client using JWT in place of sessions. I\'m

Answer 1

I'm also using python-social-auth and django-rest-framework-jwt for user authentication.

The way I was able to integrate the two authentication systems together was by creating a custom view that takes in the 'access_token' provided by the oAuth provider and attempts to create a new user with it. Once the user is created, instead of returning the authenticated user/session I return the JWT token.

The following code snippets explain the solution.

Back-End

In my views.py file I included the following:

@psa()
def auth_by_token(request, backend):
    """Decorator that creates/authenticates a user with an access_token"""
    token = request.DATA.get('access_token')
    user = request.user
    user = request.backend.do_auth(
            access_token=request.DATA.get('access_token')
        )
    if user:
        return user
    else:
        return None

class FacebookView(views.APIView):
    """View to authenticate users through Facebook."""

    permission_classes = (permissions.AllowAny,)

    def post(self, request, format=None):
        auth_token = request.DATA.get('access_token', None)
        backend = request.DATA.get('backend', None)
        if auth_token and backend:
            try:
                # Try to authenticate the user using python-social-auth
                user = auth_by_token(request, backend)
            except Exception,e:
                return Response({
                        'status': 'Bad request',
                        'message': 'Could not authenticate with the provided token.'
                    }, status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)
            if user:
                if not user.is_active:
                    return Response({
                        'status': 'Unauthorized',
                        'message': 'The user account is disabled.'
                    }, status=status.HTTP_401_UNAUTHORIZED)

                # This is the part that differs from the normal python-social-auth implementation.
                # Return the JWT instead.

                # Get the JWT payload for the user.
                payload = jwt_payload_handler(user)

                # Include original issued at time for a brand new token,
                # to allow token refresh
                if api_settings.JWT_ALLOW_REFRESH:
                    payload['orig_iat'] = timegm(
                        datetime.utcnow().utctimetuple()
                    )

                # Create the response object with the JWT payload.
                response_data = {
                    'token': jwt_encode_handler(payload)
                }

                return Response(response_data)
        else:
            return Response({
                    'status': 'Bad request',
                    'message': 'Authentication could not be performed with received data.'
            }, status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

In my urls.py I included the following route:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    ...
    url(r'^api/v1/auth/facebook/', FacebookView.as_view()),
    ...
)

Front-End

Now that the backend authentication is wired up, you can use any frontend library to send the access_token and authenticate the user. In my case I used AngularJS.

In a controller file I call the API like so:

/**
* This function gets called after successfully getting the access_token from Facebook's API.
*/
function successLoginFbFn(response) {
    var deferred = $q.defer();
    $http.post('/api/v1/auth/facebook/', {
        "access_token": response.authResponse.accessToken, 
        "backend": "facebook"
    }).success(function(response, status, headers, config) {
        // Success
        if (response.token) {
            // Save the token to localStorage and redirect the user to the front-page.
            Authentication.setToken(response.token);
            window.location = '/';
        }
        deferred.resolve(response, status, headers, config);
    }).error(function(response, status, headers, config) {
        // Error
        console.error('Authentication error.');
        deferred.reject(response, status, headers, config);
    });
}

With this approach you can mix the two plugins. All sent tokens will be coming from django-rest-framework-jwt even though users can still authenticate themselves with the ones provided by sites such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.

I only showed the approach to authenticate through Facebook, however you can follow a similar approach for other providers.