Support authentication for django-rest-framework

Hello! django-rest-framework uses its own authentication system, so calling set_user or get(url, user=...) has no effect for drf views that need authentication.

I am writing a custom drf auth backend that will work with the WEBTEST_USER header, and configure my settings manually to have it used. Would you be interested in that class + an option to make WebTestMixin patch it in automatically?

[sloria]

Yep, it worked!

# core/settings/test.py
from rest_framework.authentication import RemoteUserAuthentication

class WebTestAuthentication(RemoteUserAuthentication):
    header = 'WEBTEST_USER'

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS.insert(0, 'django.contrib.auth.backends.RemoteUserBackend')
REST_FRAMEWORK['DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES'].insert(0, 'core.settings.test.WebTestAuthentication')

[merwok]

DRF is adding support for authn based on REMOTE_USER, which will make my small class obsolete: https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework/pull/5306/files

Do you think there is value in adding my code to the docs in the meantime, or should we just close this ticket?

*edit* I forgot that this module uses WEBTEST_USER, not REMOTE_USER, so something is still needed.

*2nd edit* That something will probably be:

class WebtestAuthentication(RemoteUserAuthentication):
    header = 'WEBTEST_USER'

+ settings for django auth backend and drf auth backend.