How do you authenticate a websocket with token authentication on django channels?

Question

We want to use django-channels for our websockets but we need to authenticate as well. We have a rest api running with django-rest-framework and there we use tokens to authenticate a user, but the same functionality does not seem to be built into django-channels.

Answer 1

For Django-Channels 2 you can write custom authentication middleware https://gist.github.com/rluts/22e05ed8f53f97bdd02eafdf38f3d60a

token_auth.py:

from channels.auth import AuthMiddlewareStack
from rest_framework.authtoken.models import Token
from django.contrib.auth.models import AnonymousUser


class TokenAuthMiddleware:
    """
    Token authorization middleware for Django Channels 2
    """

    def __init__(self, inner):
        self.inner = inner

    def __call__(self, scope):
        headers = dict(scope['headers'])
        if b'authorization' in headers:
            try:
                token_name, token_key = headers[b'authorization'].decode().split()
                if token_name == 'Token':
                    token = Token.objects.get(key=token_key)
                    scope['user'] = token.user
            except Token.DoesNotExist:
                scope['user'] = AnonymousUser()
        return self.inner(scope)

TokenAuthMiddlewareStack = lambda inner: TokenAuthMiddleware(AuthMiddlewareStack(inner))

routing.py:

from django.urls import path

from channels.http import AsgiHandler
from channels.routing import ProtocolTypeRouter, URLRouter
from channels.auth import AuthMiddlewareStack

from yourapp.consumers import SocketCostumer
from yourapp.token_auth import TokenAuthMiddlewareStack

application = ProtocolTypeRouter({
    "websocket": TokenAuthMiddlewareStack(
        URLRouter([
            path("socket/", SocketCostumer),
        ]),
    ),

})