Django Private Views

Site-wide login protection.

Author: Julien Phalip, @julienphalip. Originally released in this blog post.

Packaged and released by: Tom Christie, @_tomchristie.

Overview

A common pattern in websites is when a few pages are protected and require a login to be accessed. The @login_required decorator often comes in handy for these situations. But, another pattern which is quite common is when most of the site is protected, with just a few exceptions of pages that remain public (e.g. frontpage, registration page, etc.). In that case, it can be quite tedious to decorate all of the views with @login_required, and it can be easy to forget to decorate some of them.

django-private-views protects every view and then lets you explicitly tell which views should be public. This makes things both easier and less error-prone.

Installation

Install django-private-views from PyPI.

pip install django-private-views

Add the privateviews middleware to your settings:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    ...
    privateviews.middleware.LoginRequiredMiddleware
)

Declaring public views

At this point, all of your views except settings.LOGIN_URL will require you to log in. So, we now need to specify the few views that should be public. There are three different ways at your disposal: using a special decorator, listing the public views, or listing the public URL paths.

Using a Decorator

Using @login_not_required you can explicitly force a view to be public. For example:

from privateviews.decorators import login_not_required

@login_not_required
def frontpage(request):
    ...

In this case, the frontpage view will be properly displayed even if you’re not logged in.

Listing public views

If you don’t have direct access to modify a view’s code (e.g., it’s in a third-party application), you still can force that view to be public by adding it to the PUBLIC_VIEWS setting in your settings file. Here’s an example if you’re using the django.contrib.auth system and the django-registration application:

PUBLIC_VIEWS = [
    'django.contrib.auth.views.password_reset_done',
    'django.contrib.auth.views.password_reset',
    'django.contrib.auth.views.password_reset_confirm',
    'django.contrib.auth.views.password_reset_complete',
    'registration.views.register',
    'registration.views.activate',
]

Listing URL public paths

The third and last way is to directly specify the URL paths (as regular expressions) for the pages you want to be public. This can be useful, for example, if a page is rendered by a generic view. For that, you need to add the PUBLIC_PATHS setting in your settings file. Here’s an example:

PUBLIC_PATHS = [
    '^/accounts/register/complete/$', # Uses the 'direct_to_template' generic view
]

Making 404 views private

At this point non-logged in users will still be able to see 404 responses if they visit a url that doesn't map to a view. That's not ideal as it shouldn't be possible to determine the site structure without being logged in.

To make 404 views private to everyone except logged in users, add the following as the final line in your top level urlconf:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    ...
    url(r'^', 'privateviews.views.private_404')
)

License

Copyright © 2012, Julien Phalip & DabApps.

All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.