Handling django rest framework + vue SPA auth

Question

How could I get the same functionality as django provides for authenticated user (an user global object to retrieve data for user profile etc.) into vue, for a single page application (using Vue Router, of course).

My point is that I do not know how could I create a middleware for vue equivalently to django middleware for keeping an user logged in once he provided username and password.

I know that I can use django rest framework jwt to implement an endpoint /api-token-auth/ to get the token needed (storing it into localStorge, so I could get it into axios headers) to be able to retrieve information from the api, but I don't have any user session besides the token, I don't have any information about the user passed to templates, of course.

How could I pass an user global object to every template? Is there an easy way to do that?

Thanks in advance.

Django provide 'user' context object in each template if appropriate settings exist. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13713077/get-user-information-in-django-templates . if I understood you well else please explain more — adnanmuttaleb, Sep 16 '18 at 14:34
@adnanmuttaleb I don't intend to use django templates. I have Vue app separately from django. — yierstem, Sep 16 '18 at 14:38

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 17 '18 at 14:53

Session Authentication can be implemented with Django REST Frameworks by adding SessionAuthentication class to settings.py as follows.

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.authentication.SessionAuthentication',
    ),
   'DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.permissions.IsAuthenticated',
    )
}

This will use Django's default session backend for Authentication. The catch, you'll need to make sure you include a valid CSRF token for any "unsafe" HTTP method calls - PUT, PATCH, POST, DELETE.

For accessing current user, you can create API endpoint /users/current with

class CurrentUserView(APIView):
    def get(self, request):
        serializer = UserSerializer(request.user)
        return Response(serializer.data)

Handling django rest framework + vue SPA auth

1 Answers1