Talk given at DjangoConUS 2018

Slides available here.

Traditional Django handles user authentication for us. REST Framework? Not so much. The abundance of choice is overwhelming and typically THE biggest obstacle for newcomers.

This talk is a deep dive on authentication in Django REST Framework. We’ll start with an overview of HTTP and REST APIs before demonstrating how to implement the 4 built-in auth modes and their respective pros/cons. Special attention will be paid to common gotchas such as, Why do I need “both” TokenAuth and SessionAuth? What are JWTs?

Next we’ll implement a real-world REST auth setup that includes user registration, password reset/confirm, social auth, and endpoints for sign up, log in, and log out. The third-party packages django-rest-auth and django-allauth will be used .

By the end of the talk attendees will understand the basics of REST authentication, the tradeoffs involved, and walk away with a working implementation to jumpstart their future projects.