django-tokenapi

This is a Django application which allows you to create simple APIs that use token-based authentication. You can easily open up existing views to the API by adding a single decorator.

This is useful if you want to create applications on mobile devices which connect to your Django website, but where only your clients are expected to access the API.

If instead you are looking to open up an API to the public, you are better off going with a framework with OAuth support, of which there exist some really good implementations.

Installation

First obtain tokenapi package and place it somewhere on your PYTHONPATH, for example in your project directory (where settings.py is).

Alternatively, if you are using some sort of virtual environment, like virtualenv, you can perform a regular installation or use pip:

python setup.py install

# or ...

pip install django-tokenapi

Add tokenapi to your INSTALLED_APPS.

Ensure that django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend is in your AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS.

Add tokenapi.backends.TokenBackend to your AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS.

Include tokenapi.urls in your urls.py. It will look something like this:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'', include('tokenapi.urls')),
)

Configuration

You can change the number of days that a token is valid for by setting TOKEN_TIMEOUT_DAYS in settings.py. The default is 7.

By default, the authentication logic will not check if the user's is_active flag is set to True. To only allow active users to authenticate set TOKEN_CHECK_ACTIVE_USER to True in settings.py.

Usage

Obtaining a Token

You can obtain a token for a specific user by sending a POST request with a username and password parameter to the api_token_new view. Using curl, the request would look like:

curl -d "username=jpulgarin&password=GGGGGG" http://www.yourdomain.com/token/new.json

If the request is successful, you will receive a JSON response like so:

{"success": true, "token": "2uy-420a8efff7f882afc20d", "user": 1}

An invalid username and password pair will produce a response like so:

{"success": false, "errors": "Unable to log you in, please try again"}

You should store the user and token that are returned on the client accessing the API, as all subsequent calls will require that the request have a valid token and user pair.

Verifying a Token

You can verify that a token matches a given user by sending a GET request to the api_token view, and sending the token and user as part of the URL. Using curl it would look like:

curl http://www.yourdomain.com/token/2uy-420a8efff7f882afc20d/1.json

If valid, you will receive the following JSON response:

{"success": true}

Writing API Compatible Views

To allow a view to be accessed through token-based auth, use the tokenapi.decorators.token_required decorator. There are also JSON helper functions to make it easier to deal with JSON. This is an example of an API compatible view:

from tokenapi.decorators import token_required
from tokenapi.http import JsonResponse, JsonError

@token_required
def index(request):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        data = {
            'test1': 49,
            'test2': 'awesome',
        }
        return JsonResponse(data)
    else:
        return JsonError("Only POST is allowed")

Using a Token

The client can access any API compatible view by sending a request to it, and including user and token as request parameters (either GET or POST). Accessing the example view above using curl might look like:

curl -d "user=1&token=2uy-420a8efff7f882afc20d" http://www.yourdomain.com/index.json

You would receive the following response:

{"success": true, "test1": 49, "test2": "awesome"}

Acknowledgements

The token generating code is from django.contrib.auth.tokens, but modified so that it does not hash on a user's last login.