Book Image

Web Development with Django

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest
Book Image

Web Development with Django

By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications which stand out from the crowd, rather than spending hours on boilerplate code? Then the Django framework is where you should begin. Often referred to as a 'batteries included' web development framework, Django comes with all the core features needed to build a standalone application. Web Development with Django takes this philosophy and equips you with the knowledge and confidence to build real-world applications using Python. Starting with the essential concepts of Django, you'll cover its major features by building a website called Bookr – a repository for book reviews. This end-to-end case study is split into a series of bitesize projects that are presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you progress, you'll learn various practical skills, including how to serve static files to add CSS, JavaScript, and images to your application, how to implement forms to accept user input, and how to manage sessions to ensure a reliable user experience. Throughout this book, you'll cover key daily tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Django.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Preface

Authentication

As we learned in Chapter 9, Sessions and Authentication, it is important to authenticate the users of our application. It is good practice to only allow those users who have registered in the application to log in and access information from the application. Similarly, for REST APIs too, we need to design a way to authenticate and authorize users before any information is passed on. For example, suppose Facebook's website makes an API request to get a list of all comments for a post. If they did not have authentication on this endpoint, you could use it to programmatically get comments for any post you want. They obviously don't want to allow this, so some sort of authentication needs to be implemented.

There are different authentication schemes, such as Basic Authentication, Session Authentication, Token Authentication, Remote User Authentication, and various third-party authentication solutions. For the scope of this chapter, and for our Bookr application...