Django Blacklist

Blacklist users and hosts in Django. Automatically blacklist rate-limited clients.

Overview

Django Blacklist allows you to block specific users and IP addresses/networks from accessing your application. Clients can be blocked manually from the admin interface, or automatically after exceeding a request rate limit. The blacklist rules are applied for a specific duration. The blacklist is very scalable and is applied without noticeable overhead for large numbers of rules.

Installation

To install the package, run:

$ pip install django-blacklist

Add the blacklist application to INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'blacklist'
]

Add the BlacklistMiddleware middleware after AuthenticationMiddleware:

MIDDLEWARE = [
    ...
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'blacklist.middleware.BlacklistMiddleware',
    ...
]

Apply the blacklist database migrations:

$ python manage.py migrate blacklist

Usage

You can manage the blacklist rules from the admin. Changes take effect after a configurable time, or when the server is restarted. A rule can target a user or an IP address. You can also target IP networks (ranges) by specifying the optional prefixlen field (number of network prefix bits). Each rule has a specific duration. After that duration passes, rules expire automatically. When a request is blocked due to a matching rule:

Status 400 (bad request) is returned.
An error template is rendered. You can specify a custom one (see below), or use the one for status 400.
A message is logged (warning from logger blacklist.middleware for custom templates, or error from logger django.security otherwise).

Removing Expired Rules

Expired rules are not automatically removed from the database. They can be cleaned up with the included management command trim_blacklist:

$ python manage.py trim_blacklist [-c <created_days>] [-e <expired_days>]

The options -c and -e specify the minimum ages of creation and expiry, respectively.

Automatic Blacklisting

Clients can be blacklisted automatically, after exceeding a specified request rate limit. This feature requires django-ratelimit.

First, rate-limit a view by applying the @ratelimit decorator. Make sure to set block=False. Then, blacklist rate-limited clients by adding the @blacklist_ratelimited decorator. Specify the blacklist duration. For example:

from datetime import timedelta
from ratelimit.decorators import ratelimit
from blacklist.ratelimit import blacklist_ratelimited

@ratelimit(key='user_or_ip', rate='50/m', block=False)
@blacklist_ratelimited(timedelta(minutes=30))
def index(request):
    ...

Automatic rules take effect immediately. If the request comes from an authenticated user, the rule will target that user. Otherwise, it will target their IP address.

Note: The client IP address is taken from the REMOTE_ADDR value of request.META. If your application is behind one or more reverse proxies, this will, by default, always be the address of the nearest proxy. To avoid blacklisting all clients, you can set REMOTE_ADDR from the X-Forwarded-For header in middleware. However, keep in mind that this header can be forged to bypass the rate limits. To counter that, you can use the last address in that header. If you are behind two proxies, use the second to last, etc.

@blacklist_ratelimited accepts two arguments: (duration, block=True).

duration can be a timedelta object, or a tuple of two separate durations (for user-based and IP-based rules).
block specifies if the request should be blocked immediately, or passed to the view.

Automatic rules will have a comment that contains the ID of the request, which triggered the creation of the rule, and the "request line". The request ID is added only if available. Django does not generate request IDs. For that purpose, you can install django-log-request-id.

Settings

BLACKLIST_ENABLE - whether blacklisted clients should be blocked, and rate-limited clients should be blacklisted; default: True
BLACKLIST_RELOAD_PERIOD - how often to reload the blacklist, in seconds; default: 60
BLACKLIST_RATELIMITED_ENABLE - whether rate-limited clients should be automatically blacklisted; requires BLACKLIST_ENABLE; default: True
BLACKLIST_TEMPLATE - name of a custom error template to render to blocked clients; its context will contain request and exception; set to None to use the template for status 400; default: None
BLACKLIST_LOGGING_ENABLE - whether blocked requests should be logged (honored only if a custom error template is configured); default: True