Authentication in API (REST)

[Neznez]

Hi all, I'm newbie in Django, and I started to build my own API. I
know that there is Piston or Django REST framework, but I want to
learn API from scratch. What I want to know is, how to make my HTTP
Response (View) is perform authentication before can be accessed, or
we can make it have to throw username and password to access the HTTP
Response?

My code is very simple, like this one:
def test_api_view(request, whatever):
#
# do things
#
return HttpResponse(serializers.serialize("json", mydictionary),
mimetype='application/json')

Thank you.

[Malcolm Box]

On 9 June 2011 17:51, Neznez <yohane...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all, I'm newbie in Django, and I started to build my own API. I
know that there is Piston or Django REST framework, but I want to
learn API from scratch. What I want to know is, how to make my HTTP
Response (View) is perform authentication before can be accessed, or
we can make it have to throw username and password to access the HTTP
Response?

 

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/topics/auth/

Malcolm

[Yohanes Adhi Nugraha]

Hi Malcolm,

Not that one, if we use django.contrib.auth and @login_required, it's
only redirects you to login page.
What I saw from another site is, browser will popup an alert with
username and password to be filled.

Nez

[Malcolm Box]

View source is your friend. Have a look at the other site and figure out how they do it.

My guess is that they will have an unauthenticated page with some JS on it that tries to make an authenticated call, catches any return error and prompts for login.

Malcolm
 

[Stuart MacKay]

Neznez,

The authentication problem is one that has never really been solved to
any general level of satisfaction for REST APIs, since the connection
should be stateless. For HTTP authentication there is either HTTPS +
Basic or Digest. HTTPS + Basic considered to be the easiest to
implement and the most secure but running a server with SSL is not the
most trivial of tasks and there are issues for clients and the problems
of managing certificates, etc. etc.

For a Java based REST API I used the scheme used by Amazon web services
where the request is signed using a secret key and then authenticated on
the server which worked rather well and was resistant against lots of
different types of attack. You can find out more at
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/index.html?RESTAuthentication.html.
However I am not sure what level of support you can find in django.

Stuart

[Malcolm Box]

I think oauth solves this problem well. What do you see wrong with it?

Malcolm

Sent from my iPhone, please excuse any typos

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[Stuart MacKay]

Malcolm,

oAuth also looks like a great solution - it was not as well developed
when I last looked at REST authentication a couple of years ago. There
is a lot of developer support now as well, http://oauth.net/code/,
specifically https://github.com/simplegeo/python-oauth2

Stuart