authentication

We are quickly going to see how do we setup authentication in Django. You wont believe how easy it will be, It is a matter of only 10 min.

git url – https://github.com/letsblogcontent/Python/tree/master/djangoauthentication

Step 1

Lets begin with creation of the project using command django-admin startproject djangoauth. I will be using pycharm to edit files. You can edit in pycharm or anyother ide or your choice.

Step 2 –

On the terminal, in our project root directory, execute commands “python manage.py makemigrations” and “python manage.py migrate”

Step 3 –
Lets create a template directory where we will place our html files. I have created a templates directory in the root of the project. You may create the same structure. Also we need to register this directory in the settings.py file in the templates object. Against the DIRS add the following path. This will register our templates directory with the django project

 'DIRS': [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates')],

Lets add a home page for our application by adding home.html under the templates directory and add some sample content as below.

Step 4 – Add url mapping to enable authentication and the home page in the urls.py of djangoauth project (/djangoauth/djangoauth) file. The “django.contrib.auth.urls” is where we set up authentication

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include
from django.views.generic.base import TemplateView

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
]

urlpatterns += [
    path('', include('django.contrib.auth.urls')),
    path('', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='home.html'))
]

Step 5 –
Now lets run and check what is happening on the browser. Run our application by execution “python manage.py runserver”. You should see following code

Step 6 –
Django provides an admin page where we can add modify users. We will first create a superuser so that we can add more users to log-in. To create a superuser execute command “python maange.py createsuperuser”

To login with this user, On the browser navigate to http://localhost:8000/admin, this will show up the login page. Login with the user created above, you should see the below page

Now create a new user by clicking on add button. you will be presented with below page. fill in the details and click save. On the next page you can just click save.

Step 7 Next up is we need to setup the login page. Django looks for login page under the registration directory of templates. So we create a login.html file as below in templates/registrations directory.



{% block content %}
  <form method="post" action="{% url 'login' %}">
    {% csrf_token %}
    <table>
      <tr>
        <td>{{ form.username.label_tag }}</td>
        <td>{{ form.username }}</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>{{ form.password.label_tag }}</td>
        <td>{{ form.password }}</td>
      </tr>
    </table>
    <input type="submit" value="login" />
    <input type="hidden" name="next" value="{{ next }}" />
  </form>

{% endblock %}

Next we update our home.html to show login and logout. Copy the below content to home.html

{% if user.is_authenticated %}
<h1>Welcome to home</h1>
{% else %}
<h1> Login to the application</h1>
 {% endif %}
<a href = "http://localhost:8000/login/">login</a>
{% if user.is_authenticated %}
<a href = "http://localhost:8000/logout/">logout</a>
{% endif %}

Add below variables to settings.py file. Here we are setting the login url and where should it redirect upon login and logout. Save the file and now navigate to http://localhost:8000/

LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL = '/'

LOGIN_URL = '/login'

LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL = '/'

LOGOUT_REDIRECT_URL= '/'

navigate to http://localhost:8000/ to below page

Click on login and enter with the user you created to see below page. And now you can click on logout to check if it works. It should take you back to the login screen.