apache2 - Authorization header missing in django rest_framework, is apache to blame?

Question

I've managed to extend TokenAuthentication and I have a working model when using the request session to store my tokens, however when I attempt to pass Authorization as a header parameter as described here, I noticed that my Responses come back without the META variable HTTP_AUTHORIZATION. I also noticed that if I pass "Authorization2" as a header parameter that it is visible in the request:

{
    '_content_type': '', 
    'accepted_media_type': 'application/json', 
    '_request': <WSGIRequest
        path:/api/test_auth/,
        GET:<QueryDict: {}>,
        POST:<QueryDict: {}>,
        COOKIES:{
            'MOD_AUTH_CAS_S': 'ba90237b5b6a15017f8ca1d5ef0b95c1',
            'csrftoken': 'VswgfoOGHQmbWpCXksGUycj94XlwBwMh',
            'sessionid': 'de1f3a8eee48730dd34f6b4d41caa210'
        },
        META:{
           'DOCUMENT_ROOT': '/etc/apache2/htdocs',
           'GATEWAY_INTERFACE': 'CGI/1.1',
           'HTTPS': '1',
           'HTTP_ACCEPT': '*/*',
           'HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3',
           'HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING': 'gzip,deflate,sdch',
           'HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
           'HTTP_AUTHORIZATION2': 'Token 9944b09199c62bcf9418ad846dd0e4bbdfc6ee4c',
           ...

My first guess is that the authorization header is being removed by apache, and I have read a few S/O questions that state that apache will throw out the value if it does not match basic authorization and authenticate, but I have no idea how to allow the Authorization header to 'pass through' to Django and the WSGIRequest. Does anyone know how to solve this problem?

I also use mod_auth_cas and mod_proxy, if that changes anything..

Answer 1

If you are using Apache and mod_wsgi, then I found the easy solution to this in the official Django REST framework website

Apache mod_wsgi specific configuration

Note that if deploying to Apache using mod_wsgi, the authorization header is not passed through to a WSGI application by default, as it is assumed that authentication will be handled by Apache, rather than at an application level.

If you are deploying to Apache, and using any non-session based authentication, you will need to explicitly configure mod_wsgi to pass the required headers through to the application. This can be done by specifying the WSGIPassAuthorization directive in the appropriate context and setting it to 'On'.

# this can go in either server config, virtual host, directory or .htaccess 
WSGIPassAuthorization On