Django REST framework JWT Auth

Overview

This package provides JSON Web Token Authentication support for Django REST framework.

If you want to read more about JWT, here's a great blog post by the guys at Auth0 that talks about Cookie vs Token based authentication.

Installation

Install using pip...

$ pip install djangorestframework-jwt

Usage

In your settings.py, add JSONWebTokenAuthentication to Django REST framework's DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES.

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES': (
    	'rest_framework.permissions.IsAuthenticated',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': (
    	'rest_framework.authentication.SessionAuthentication',
	    'rest_framework.authentication.BasicAuthentication'
        'rest_framework_jwt.authentication.JSONWebTokenAuthentication',
    ),
}

In your urls.py add the following URL route to enable obtaining a token via a POST included the user's username and password.

urlpatterns = patterns(
    '',
    # ...

    url(r'^api-token-auth/', 'rest_framework_jwt.views.obtain_jwt_token'),
)

You can easily test if the endpoint is working by doing the following in your terminal, if you had a user created with the username admin and password abc123.

$ curl -X POST -d "username=admin&password=abc123" http://localhost:8000/api-token-auth/

Additional Settings

There are some additional settings that you can override similar to how you'd do it with Django REST framework itself. Here are all the available defaults.

JWT_AUTH = {
    'DEFAULT_JWT_ENCODE_HANDLER':
    'rest_framework_jwt.utils.jwt_encode_handler',

    'DEFAULT_JWT_DECODE_HANDLER':
    'rest_framework_jwt.utils.jwt_decode_handler',

    'DEFAULT_JWT_PAYLOAD_HANDLER':
    'rest_framework_jwt.utils.jwt_payload_handler',

    'JWT_SECRET_KEY': settings.SECRET_KEY,
    'JWT_ALGORITHM': 'HS256',
    'JWT_VERIFY': True,
    'JWT_VERIFY_EXPIRATION': True,
    'JWT_LEEWAY': 0,
    'JWT_EXPIRATION_DELTA': datetime.timedelta(seconds=300)
}

This packages uses the JSON Web Token Python implementation, PyJWT and allows to modify some of it's available options.

JWT_SECRET_KEY

This is the secret key used to encrypt the JWT. Make sure this is safe and not shared or public.

Default is your project's settings.SECRET_KEY.

JWT_ALGORITHM

Possible values:

HS256 - HMAC using SHA-256 hash algorithm (default)

HS384 - HMAC using SHA-384 hash algorithm

HS512 - HMAC using SHA-512 hash algorithm

RS256 - RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 signature algorithm using SHA-256 hash algorithm

RS384 - RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 signature algorithm using SHA-384 hash algorithm

RS512 - RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 signature algorithm using SHA-512 hash algorithm

Note:

For the RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 algorithms, the "secret" argument in jwt.encode is supposed to be a private RSA key as imported with Crypto.PublicKey.RSA.importKey. Likewise, the "secret" argument in jwt.decode is supposed to be the public RSA key imported with the same method.

Default is "HS256".

JWT_VERIFY

If the secret is wrong, it will raise a jwt.DecodeError telling you as such. You can still get at the payload by setting the JWT_VERIFY to False.

Default is True.

JWT_VERIFY_EXPIRATION

You can turn off expiration time verification with by setting JWT_VERIFY_EXPIRATION to False.

Default is True.

JWT_LEEWAY

This allows you to validate an expiration time which is in the past but no very far. For example, if you have a JWT payload with an expiration time set to 30 seconds after creation but you know that sometimes you will process it after 30 seconds, you can set a leeway of 10 seconds in order to have some margin.

Default is 0 seconds.

JWT_EXPIRATION_DELTA

This is an instance of Python's datetime.timedelta. This will be added to datetime.utcnow() to set the expiration time.

Default is datetime.timedelta(seconds=300)(5 minutes).

marccerrato/django-rest-framework-jwt