Django JWT authentication - user is anonymous in middleware

Question

I am using Django JWT to power up authentication system in my project. Also, I have a middleware, and the problem is that inside it, the user is anonymous for some reason, while in the view I am able to access the correct user by request.user. This issue is driving me crazy because some time ago this code worked perfectly ! Is this JWT's bug or I am doing something wrong ?

class TimezoneMiddleware(MiddlewareMixin):
         def process_request(self, request):
            # request.user is ANONYMOUS HERE !!!!
            if not request.user.is_anonymous:
                  tzname = UserProfile.objects.get(user = request.user).tz_name
                  if tzname:
                       timezone.activate(pytz.timezone(tzname))

Relevant settings.py module:

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.authentication.SessionAuthentication',
        'rest_framework.authentication.BasicAuthentication',
        'rest_framework_jwt.authentication.JSONWebTokenAuthentication',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.permissions.IsAuthenticated',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_RENDERER_CLASSES': (
        'djangorestframework_camel_case.render.CamelCaseJSONRenderer',
        # Any other renders
    ),

    'DEFAULT_PARSER_CLASSES': (
        'djangorestframework_camel_case.parser.CamelCaseJSONParser',
        # Any other parsers
    ),
}

JWT_AUTH = {
    'JWT_ENCODE_HANDLER':
    'rest_framework_jwt.utils.jwt_encode_handler',

    'JWT_DECODE_HANDLER':
    'rest_framework_jwt.utils.jwt_decode_handler',

    'JWT_PAYLOAD_HANDLER':
    'rest_framework_jwt.utils.jwt_payload_handler',

    'JWT_PAYLOAD_GET_USER_ID_HANDLER':
    'rest_framework_jwt.utils.jwt_get_user_id_from_payload_handler',

    'JWT_RESPONSE_PAYLOAD_HANDLER': 'rest_framework_jwt.utils.jwt_response_payload_handler', 
    # 'rest_authentication.views.jwt_response_payload_handler',
    'JWT_SECRET_KEY': SECRET_KEY,
    'JWT_PUBLIC_KEY': None,
    'JWT_PRIVATE_KEY': None,
    'JWT_ALGORITHM': 'HS256',
    'JWT_VERIFY': True,
    'JWT_VERIFY_EXPIRATION': False,
    'JWT_LEEWAY': 0,
    'JWT_EXPIRATION_DELTA': datetime.timedelta(seconds=300),
    'JWT_AUDIENCE': None,
    'JWT_ISSUER': None,
    'JWT_ALLOW_REFRESH': False,
    'JWT_REFRESH_EXPIRATION_DELTA': datetime.timedelta(days=7),
    'JWT_AUTH_HEADER_PREFIX': 'JWT',
}

I have also come across resources which helped me to retrieve the actual user, BUT ! I am still unable to set the timezone (timezone.activate(pytz.timezone(tzname)) seems to be ignored.

Answer 1

Yes, this issue is due to the JWT. You can checkout the discussion for it https://github.com/GetBlimp/django-rest-framework-jwt/issues/45 To fix this you will have to create a custom middleware which will set the request.user. Here is one I am using in my code:

from django.contrib.auth.middleware import get_user
from django.utils.functional import SimpleLazyObject
from rest_framework_jwt.authentication import JSONWebTokenAuthentication


class JWTAuthenticationMiddleware(object):
    def __init__(self, get_response):
        self.get_response = get_response

    def __call__(self, request):
        request.user = SimpleLazyObject(lambda:self.__class__.get_jwt_user(request))
        return self.get_response(request)

    @staticmethod
    def get_jwt_user(request):
        user = get_user(request)
        if user.is_authenticated:
            return user
        jwt_authentication = JSONWebTokenAuthentication()
        if jwt_authentication.get_jwt_value(request):
            user, jwt = jwt_authentication.authenticate(request)
        return user

Include this in the middlewares. It should come above all the middlewares which are using request.user.

Answer 2

@Atul Mishra: Thank you! Changed your version to the newest drf-jwt package (1.17.2). Seems like the the current github repository moved from this to here

from django.contrib.auth.middleware import get_user
from django.utils.functional import SimpleLazyObject
from rest_framework_jwt.authentication import JSONWebTokenAuthentication


class JWTAuthenticationInMiddleware(object):
    def __init__(self, get_response):
        self.get_response = get_response

    def __call__(self, request):
        request.user = SimpleLazyObject(lambda:self.__class__.get_jwt_user(request))
        return self.get_response(request)

    @staticmethod
    def get_jwt_user(request):
        # Already authenticated
        user = get_user(request)
        if user.is_authenticated:
            return user

        # Do JTW authentication
        jwt_authentication = JSONWebTokenAuthentication()

        authenticated = jwt_authentication.authenticate(request)
        if authenticated:
            user, jwt = authenticated

        return user