This is an example of how an authentication token can be passed to a Pyramid application via a query string parameter and handled globally. Advanced parsing of the token is outside the scope, thus I implemented only a “dumb token” that simply contains the username in cleartext.
When in the root directory of this repo:
- Create a virtual environment, if desired (I did:
virtualenv -p python3 .venv; thensource .venv/bin/activate) python setup.py develop- Ready to ride!
Each of the following illustrates one of two methods of implementing the said feature:
pserve development.ini authmode=policy pserve development.ini authmode=redirect
In either case, the main point is using a query string to log in, as in:
http://localhost:6543/info?token=joe --> will log in as user `joe`
Seems like the shortest code: a request handler checks for the token GET parameter and, having found it, pops it and emits a redirect to the same URL with that parameter removed, also saving the login cookie. But an additional request is made.
To avoid this extra request, I ended up subclassing the default AuthTktAuthenticationPolicy and adding extra functionality that checks for the token GET parameter. In this check I add a callback that will add to the response the headers for saving the login cookie. I needed to save the username to a new field (i.e. added by me) in the Request object — which I think wasn’t quite the nicest idea — to avoid adding the callback repeatedly every time; instead the token is popped from GET the first time it is read.