Writing Auth Backends

newauth provides a couple base classes for defining backends. All backends should extend the BaseAuthBackend. Backend classes are created in much the same way as you would for the django.contrib.auth app. You need to create an authenticate() method that takes the arguments (credentials) that your backend requires and a get_user() method that takes an id and returns an instance of the user.

Here is a very simple backend that authenticates a user using only their user id. Not a very secure authentication but it illustrates how to write an authentication backend:

from nweauth.backend import BaseAuthBackend
from newauth.models import User

class UserIdBackend(BaseAuthBackend):
    def authenticate(self, user_id):
        return self.get_user(user_id)

    def get_user(self, user_id):
        try:
            return User.objects.get(pk=user_id)
        except User.DoesNotExist, e:
            return None

Using Model Authentication

Most of the time, however, you will be creating models extending the UserBase class so you can extend the provided ModelAuthBackend which provides a default implementation of get_user() which retrieves an instance of the model associated with the backend in the NEWAUTH_BACKENDS in your settings.py.

Extending Username/Password Authentication