Django Rest Framework requesting authentication on AllowAny setting

Question

I've created a JWT-Authorised back end for an app. Login, logout, token retrieval and refresh all work fine, and as expected. I added a registration view this morning, which is throwing the usual "detail": "Authentication credentials were not provided. error you'd expect for non-authenticated requests, as that's the default (see below).

However, because this is a registration endpoint, I don't want it to only allow authorised requests. (Having checked with a valid token, the rest of the view works as expected when you supply authentication.) Looking at the permissions section of the DRF docs, I thought that using the permission_classes wrapper with AllowAny would work here, but it hasn't.

What am I missing? I feel like the permission_classes decorator should override the default setting of 'IsAuthenticated'?

I'm testing on localhost from curl:

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"email":"[email protected]", "first_name": "boba", "last_name": "fett" "password":"xyz"}' http://localhost:8000/account/register/

View is:

@permission_classes(AllowAny)
@api_view(['POST'])
def register_user(request):
    from django.contrib.auth.models import User
    from rest_framework_jwt.views import obtain_jwt_token
    if request.user.is_authenticated():
        return Response ({"already_registered": "User with that username has already registered"}, status=status.HTTP_701_ALREADY_REGISTERED)
    data = request.data

    user, created = User.objects.get_or_create(username=data["email"],
                                               email=data["email"],
                                               first_name=data["first_name"],
                                               last_name=data["last_name"],
                                               password=data["password"])
    if created:
        token = obtain_jwt_token(data["email"],data["password"] )
        return Response ({"token": token}, status=status.HTTP_200_OK)
    else:
        return Response ({"already_registered": "User with that username has already registered"}, status=status.HTTP_701_ALREADY_REGISTERED)

Permissions in settings.py are:

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

Related questions: Django Rest Framework - Authentication credentials were not provided - I think the default permissions are correct, I just want to override them in this instance.

Django Rest Framework - DELETE ajax call failure due to incorrect CSFR token - CSRF not being used as JWT Based auth.

Django: Rest Framework authenticate header - Apache specific issue (currently still on devserver localhost)

Django Rest Framework Authentication credentials were not provided - Not yet answered!

Answer 1

The order of the decorators matter. There's also some problems with your code.

I recommend using a serializer, maybe something like below. If you want to use emails as username, I would make a custom User model. Django's default authentication system's username field has max_length of 30, and people's email addresses easily surpass that.

class UserSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    first_name = serializers.CharField(required=False, allow_null=True)
    last_name = serializers.CharField(required=False, allow_null=True)
    class Meta:
        model = User
        fields = ('id', 'username', 'first_name', 'last_name', 'email', 'password')

    def create(self, validated_data):
        return User.objects.create_user(**validated_data)

@api_view(['POST'])
@permission_classes([permissions.AllowAny,])
def register_user(request):
    if request.user.is_authenticated():
        return Response({"already_registered": "User with that username has already registered"}, status=701)
    data = request.data
    serializer = UserSerializer(data=data, partial=True)
    if serializer.is_valid():
        serializer.save(username=serializer.validated_data['email'])
        token = #call the url to get your tokens, use urllib or something similar
        return Response({"token": token}, status=status.HTTP_201_CREATED)
    else:
        return Response(serializer.errors, status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

Edit The ordering of decorators goes like this:

@decorator
@decorator2
def func():
    print('hello world')

Is the same as decorator(decorator2(func)))

Answer 2

You have disabled permissions using @permission_classes, but that's only the "authorization" part of "authentication and authorization". You need to disable the authentication handlers as well using @authentication_classes in order to stop receiving a 401/403 error.