Detect first time user has authenticated using Django Rest Framework

Question

I'm using DRF to allow users of my mobile app to authenticate to my web application.

I want to create a model instance associated with this user the first time a user "logs in" using the client.

I'm using token-based authentication in DRF, and for my /api/authenticate/ endpoint I'm pointing at url(r'^authenticate/', restviews.obtain_auth_token),

It seems like the best way to handle this is to override ObtainAuthToken(APIView), by adding this class to my api/views.py. This class looks like this:

class ObtainAuthTokenCustomized(APIView):
    throttle_classes = ()
    permission_classes = ()
    parser_classes = (parsers.FormParser, parsers.MultiPartParser, parsers.JSONParser,)
    renderer_classes = (renderers.JSONRenderer,)
    serializer_class = AuthTokenSerializer

    def post(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        serializer = self.serializer_class(data=request.data)
        serializer.is_valid(raise_exception=True)
        user = serializer.validated_data['user']
        token, created = Token.objects.get_or_create(user=user)
        return Response({'token': token.key})


obtain_auth_token = ObtainAuthTokenCustomized.as_view()

It looks like I would want to insert a test prior to get_or_create for whether a token has been created previously for this user. And if so, perform the model instance creation I have planned.

Is this there a better way to handle this?

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:01

From what I can tell this is the best place to handle this.

The reason is that DRF does not currently have a token expiration capability. So once a token is created with the above class it does not go away.

This means created will return True if it is the user's first time logging in:

token, created = Token.objects.get_or_create(user=user)

Thus you'd simply test created on the following line and perform the model creation or other actions necessary.

Additional logic may be necessary to handle a situation if tokens were removed. For example, if you used created an API logout method like the one given in this answer.

Detect first time user has authenticated using Django Rest Framework

1 Answers1