What is purpose of changing token key name in DjangoRestFramework

Question

In DjangoRestFramework you can change keyword in header for token authentification.

From docs

Note: If you want to use a different keyword in the header, such as Bearer, simply subclass TokenAuthentication and set the keyword class variable.

What is the purpose of changing default keyword? I've seen 'Bearer', 'Basic' and a few other variants, but just don't understand the purpose of doing so. Can anyone explain?

Answer 1

I found how we need to pass the keyword to TokenAuthentication.

class BearerAuthentication(authentication.TokenAuthentication):
    '''
    Simple token based authentication using utvsapitoken.

    Clients should authenticate by passing the token key in the 'Authorization'
    HTTP header, prepended with the string 'Bearer '.  For example:

    Authorization: Bearer 956e252a-513c-48c5-92dd-bfddc364e812
    '''
    keyword = 'Bearer'

Then instead of using authentication.TokenAuthentication in the settings.py we will use BearerAuthentication

# settings.py
REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': (                                                                                                                                                                                       
        'your.models.BearerAuthentication',
    )
}