Django Always Authenticated

A middleware that ensures that a request always has an authenticated user.

If the request doesn't have an authenticated user, it logs in a default user. If the default user doesn't exist, it is created.

Compatibility

This middleware has been tested with these versions of Django:

• 1.7
• 1.8
• 1.9
• 1.10
• master (at the time of the release)

Setup

Install from PyPI:

pip install django_always_authenticated

Add to MIDDLEWARE (MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES for Django <1.10) in settings file:

MIDDLEWARE = (
    ...
    'always_authenticated.middleware.AlwaysAuthenticatedMiddleware',
)

As a security safeguard, the middleware will raise an ImproperlyConfiguredException when running in production mode (DEBUG=False). To run the middleware in production, set ALWAYS_AUTHENTICATED_DEBUG_ONLY to False.

Configuration

This middleware reads these settings:

ALWAYS_AUTHENTICATED_USERNAME

A string with the name of the default user, defaults to 'user'.

ALWAYS_AUTHENTICATED_USER_DEFAULTS

A dict with additional default values to set when creating the user.

ALWAYS_AUTHENTICATED_DEBUG_ONLY

Set to False to allow running with DEBUG=False.

Example project

There is a very single example project that demonstrates the middleware in the directory example_project.

Running Tests

To run the tests, install the requirements and run py.test:

pip install -r requirements.txt
py.test

You can also use tox to run the tests with all supported versions of Python and Django:

pip install tox
tox