Session authentication with Django channels

Question

Trying to get authentication working with Django channels with a very simple websockets app that echoes back whatever the user sends over with a prefix \"You said: \"

Answer 1

I ran into this problem and I found that it was due to a couple of issues that might be the cause. I'm not suggesting this will solve your issue, but might give you some insight. Keep in mind I am using rest framework. First I was overriding the User model. Second when I defined the application variable in my root routing.py I didn't use my own AuthMiddleware. I was using the docs suggested AuthMiddlewareStack. So, per the Channels docs, I defined my own custom authentication middleware, which takes my JWT value from the cookies, authenticates it and assigns it to the scope["user"] like so:

routing.py

from channels.routing import ProtocolTypeRouter, URLRouter

import app.routing
from .middleware import JsonTokenAuthMiddleware

application = ProtocolTypeRouter(
    {
        "websocket": JsonTokenAuthMiddleware(
            (URLRouter(app.routing.websocket_urlpatterns))
        )
    } 

middleware.py

from http import cookies
from django.contrib.auth.models import AnonymousUser
from django.db import close_old_connections
from rest_framework.authtoken.models import Token
from rest_framework_jwt.authentication import BaseJSONWebTokenAuthentication

class JsonWebTokenAuthenticationFromScope(BaseJSONWebTokenAuthentication):

    def get_jwt_value(self, scope):
        try:
            cookie = next(x for x in scope["headers"] if x[0].decode("utf-8") 
                == "cookie")[1].decode("utf-8")
            return cookies.SimpleCookie(cookie)["JWT"].value
        except:
            return None


class JsonTokenAuthMiddleware(BaseJSONWebTokenAuthentication):
    def __init__(self, inner):
        self.inner = inner

    def __call__(self, scope):

        try:
            close_old_connections()
            user, jwt_value = 
                JsonWebTokenAuthenticationFromScope().authenticate(scope)
            scope["user"] = user
        except:
            scope["user"] = AnonymousUser()
        return self.inner(scope)

Hope this helps this helps!