django-iitg-auth

django-iitg-auth is a reusable Django application which provides a custom authencation backend for authenticating with IIT Guwahati webmail servers, a login form and a utility view.

Installation

django-iitg-auth can be installed using following pip command.

pip install django-iitg-auth

Usage: Authentication Backend

Add 'iitgauth' to INSTALLED_APPS settings of the project.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    ...
    ...
    'iitgauth',
]

Add 'iitgauth.auth.WebMailAuthenticationBackend' to AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS in settings.py.

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = [
    'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',
    'iitgauth.auth.WebMailAuthenticationBackend',
]

This is all the configuration required to use the webmail authentication backend.

Note that authenticate method of the backend requires following credentials:

• username
• password
• login server
• port (default is set to 995)

Following snippet shows how webmail authentication can be done in a custom view.

from django.contrib.auth import authenticate
from django.views.generic import View

class LoginView(View):

    def get(self, request):
        # get request handling logic
        #

    def post(self, request):
        form = LoginForm(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            username = form.cleaned_data('username')
            password = form.cleaned_data('password')
            login_server = form.cleaned_data('login_server')

            # open a socket to login server and query validity of credentials
            user = auth.authenticate(username=username, password=password,
                        login_server=login_server, port=995)
            #
            # rest of authentication logic
            #
       else:
           # invalid form hadling

Usage: WebmailLoginForm and WebmailLoginView

A ready-to-use form (WebmailLoginForm) and a class based view (WebmailLoginView) are also available. Using this form and view is not necessary. You can write your own custom login form and view to use with webmail authentication backend as explained above.

This form works exactly similar to Django's built-in AuthenticationForm. Only difference is WebmailLoginForm has one extra field, .i.e. Login Server field.

WebmailLoginForm has 3 fields:

• username
• password
• login_server

WebmailLoginView is a FormView which renders WebmailLoginForm on GET and redirects to success_url on successful authentication.

Example Project

A demo project is available in django-iitg-auth-example repository.