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django-rest-knox

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Authentication module for Django rest auth.

Knox provides easy-to-use authentication for Django REST Framework The aim is to allow for common patterns in applications that are REST-based, with little extra effort; and to ensure that connections remain secure.

Knox authentication is token-based, similar to the TokenAuthentication built into DRF. However, it overcomes some problems present in the default implementation:

  • DRF tokens are limited to one per user. This does not facilitate securely signing in from multiple devices, as the token is shared. It also requires all devices to be logged out if a server-side logout is required (i.e. the token is deleted).

    Knox provides one token per call to the login view - allowing each client to have its own token which is deleted on the server side when the client logs out.

    Knox also provides an option for a logged-in client to remove all tokens that the server has - forcing all clients to re-authenticate.

  • DRF tokens are stored unencrypted in the database. This would allow an attacker unrestricted access to an account with a token if the database were compromised.

    Knox tokens are only stored in a secure hash form (like a password). Even if the database were somehow stolen, an attacker would not be able to log in with the stolen credentials.

  • DRF tokens track their creation time, but have no inbuilt mechanism for tokens expiring. Knox tokens can have an expiry configured in the app settings (default is 10 hours.)

More information can be found in the Documentation

Run the tests locally

If you need to debug a test locally and if you have docker installed, simply run the ./docker-run-tests.sh script and it will run the test suite in every Python / Django versions.

You could also simply run regular tox in the root folder as well, but that would make testing the matrix of Python / Django versions a bit more tricky.

Work on the documentation

Our documentation is generated by Mkdocs.

You can refer to their documentation on how to install it locally.

Another option is to use mkdocs.sh in this repository. It will run mkdocs in a docker container.

Running the script without any params triggers the serve command. The server is exposed on localhost on port 8000.

To configure the port the serve command will be exposing the server to, you can use the following env var:

MKDOCS_DEV_PORT="8080"

You can also pass any mkdocs command like this:

./mkdocs build
./mkdocs --help

Check the Mkdocs documentation for more.