How do you authenticate a websocket with token authentication on django channels?

Question

We want to use django-channels for our websockets but we need to authenticate as well. We have a rest api running with django-rest-framework and there we use tokens to authenticate a user, but the same functionality does not seem to be built into django-channels.

Answer 1

For Django-Channels 2 you can write custom authentication middleware https://gist.github.com/rluts/22e05ed8f53f97bdd02eafdf38f3d60a

token_auth.py:

from channels.auth import AuthMiddlewareStack from rest_framework.authtoken.models import Token from django.contrib.auth.models import AnonymousUser   class TokenAuthMiddleware:     """     Token authorization middleware for Django Channels 2     """      def __init__(self, inner):         self.inner = inner      def __call__(self, scope):         headers = dict(scope['headers'])         if b'authorization' in headers:             try:                 token_name, token_key = headers[b'authorization'].decode().split()                 if token_name == 'Token':                     token = Token.objects.get(key=token_key)                     scope['user'] = token.user             except Token.DoesNotExist:                 scope['user'] = AnonymousUser()         return self.inner(scope)  TokenAuthMiddlewareStack = lambda inner: TokenAuthMiddleware(AuthMiddlewareStack(inner)) 

routing.py:

from django.urls import path  from channels.http import AsgiHandler from channels.routing import ProtocolTypeRouter, URLRouter from channels.auth import AuthMiddlewareStack  from yourapp.consumers import SocketCostumer from yourapp.token_auth import TokenAuthMiddlewareStack  application = ProtocolTypeRouter({     "websocket": TokenAuthMiddlewareStack(         URLRouter([             path("socket/", SocketCostumer),         ]),     ),  })