Restricting all the views to authenticated users in Django

Question

I'm new to Django and I'm working on a project which has a login page as its index and a signup page. The rest of the pages all must be restricted to logged in users and if an unauthenticated user attempts to reach them, he/she must be redirected to the login page.

I see that @login_required decorator would make a single view restricted to logged in users but is there a better way to make all the views restricted and only a few available to unauthenticated users?

Answer 1

You can write a middleware:

from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required

def login_exempt(view):
    view.login_exempt = True
    return view


class LoginRequiredMiddleware:
    def __init__(self, get_response):
        self.get_response = get_response

    def __call__(self, request):
        return self.get_response(request)

    def process_view(self, request, view_func, view_args, view_kwargs):
        if getattr(view_func, 'login_exempt', False):
            return

        if request.user.is_authenticated:
            return

        # You probably want to exclude the login/logout views, etc.

        return login_required(view_func)(request, *view_args, **view_kwargs)

You add the middleware to your MIDDLEWARES list and decorate the views you don't want authenticated with login_exempt.

Answer 2

...is there a better way to make all the views restricted and only a few available to unauthenticated users?

Yes. It's time for you to learn class based views. Define a base class which requires login, and make any authenticated endpoints inherit this base class, rather than using function-based views with decoration on each function.

A popular design pattern in the implementation is to use a mixin class:

from django.contrib.auth.mixins import LoginRequiredMixin

class MyView(LoginRequiredMixin, View):
    login_url = '/login/'
    redirect_field_name = 'redirect_to'

If a view uses this mixin, all requests by non-authenticated users will be redirected to the login page.