I know that Django has a permission/group system. But that's mostly tied to each model. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
My purpose is to have groups that can do multiple stuff. For example, one group can write to this and that. One group can edit this and that in different servers, different databases. Basically, it's beyond the model system.
I just want a custom groups system that's not tied to any model.
Three permissions are generated per model by default, but you can define additional permissions that you can use for other purposes. From there, the permissions decorator can handle authorization.
You need an app like django-guardian or something to handle object-level permissions, not model.
Related
If you have django.contrib.auth in your INSTALLED_APPS django will automatically create add, change, delete and view permissions to every model in your system (or any one you add later). These are stored in auth_permission.
In django doc, here is what we can read under Groups section:
django.contrib.auth.models.Group models are a generic way of categorizing users so you can apply permissions, or some other label, to those users. A user can belong to any number of groups.
A user in a group automatically has the permissions granted to that group. For example, if the group 'Site editors' has the permission can_edit_home_page, any user in that group will have that permission.
I've a group with no permission at all (call it NADA) and I've assign that group to a specific user (let's call him Pierre). Pierre can still connect and create, update, delete or view anything on my web interface.
How can I make it working? There's few or no doc on the web for native Django Permission.
I've read this nice publication
django-permission-apps-comparison.
I know I could install django-guardian, django-role-permissions or
django-rules...
I know we can manage access via middleware or decorator But since django IS creating these tables for us (user, groups, permissions and group_permissions)
I thought it was extremely simple to implement CRUD access to any model class!
Wrong?
Do I miss something?
Note: Working with Python3.6 and Django 2.1.3
Django permissions are simple. As far as I understand your question, you are trying to create a user with no permission and he should not see any entries on the Django admin.
First thing is to make sure the user is not marked as "superuser", the superuser sees everything no matter which group they are added in.
If he is not a superuser and is still able to see the model then you should make sure he is not part of multiple groups. If a user is in multiple groups then a union of all permissions is what is applied to them. This link will give you more details on different flags for a user https://djangobook.com/users-groups-permissions/. Let me know if this helps.
Using Django 1.5 here. I have an application I've created that currently has one big set of data, for one "account" if you will. Meaning all the data in all the models in my application are available to all logged-in users. Now, I want to be able to allow more people to use my application but with their own set of data. So I need to separate users into different accounts with different sets of data for each account. There could potentially be one or multiple users that has access to each account. At this time I don't need different users within one account to have different levels of access though I do intend for one user to be the account "owner".
I know that to make this conversion, I of course need to add a field to every model with a foreign key to a new "account" model. But beyond that I'm a little foggy. This appears to be a square peg in the round hole of Django's auth system. So the question is, what is the best approach?
A few thoughts I had so far:
Simply filter each and every query by account
Wrap each and every view with a decorator, but with multiple models, do I have to create a different decorator for each model? Can I tell from within the decorator which model is being accessed?
Somehow make use of the Auth system's user_passes_test decorator, but again, different models.
Extend the auth system to include a request.account attribute
Create a new mixin for my views? What if I'm not using exclusively CBVs?
Different middleware?
I considered using a new group for each account and then filtering by group instead of a new account model but I predict that would be a poor fit in this situation, as it isn't using groups as they were intended.
This is less of a code question and more of a big-picture, best-practices question. How would you approach this?
What you request is not so exotic: This is called authority data - you seperate your users to authorities and each authority will have each own data. For instance, you may have a number of departments in an organization - the data of each department can be edited only by members of the same department. I have already written a blog post with a simple approach to that using django:
http://spapas.github.io/2013/11/05/django-authoritiy-data/
To recap the post, I propose just adding an Authority model for which your User will have a ForeignKey (each User will have a Profile).
Now, all your Models whose data will belong to specific Authorities will just contain a ForeignKey to Authority. To check for the permissions you could use CBVs - the django admin will only be available to the central Administrators that have access to all the data. I recommend against using the django permissions for authorization of Authority data. If you want read the post which is much more detailed and ask here any questions.
I'm currently designing a Django based site. For simplicity lets assume that it is a simple community site where users can log in and write messages to other users.
My current choice is wether to use the buildin User-Model or to build something my own. I don't need much from the buildin User: there will be no username (you e-mail address is you username), but you an set an internal Name of your choice which can be used by multiple users (like Facebook). Additionally, I don't need the permission system, since access to others will not be based on groups. So I would end up using only the email, firstname, lastname and password fields from the buildin User and everything else would be placed in a UserProfile.
On the other hand, the buildin User system will come handy on the backend of the site, since there is the chance I will need a group based permission system there.
All in all, it looks to me, that I rather build my one User Model and use the buildin only for access to the admin backend.
Is there anything wrong with my reflections?
Is there anything wrong with my reflections?
Yes.
My current choice is wether to use the buildin User-Model or to build something my own.
There is a third choice.
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/topics/auth/#storing-additional-information-about-users
everything else would be placed in a UserProfile
Correct.
build my one User Model and use the buildin only for access to the admin backend
Don't build your own.
Do this:
If you'd like to store additional
information related to your users,
Django provides a method to specify a
site-specific related model -- termed
a "user profile" -- for this purpose.
As the author of django-primate I would like to add some comments. Django-primate which easily lets ju modify the built in User model is meant for just that. You might need just something a little extra, then use django-primate.
But there are problems, although I do not think modifying the django User model per se is a problem at all. One problem is that the "users" are quite different, the admin user and some other user are often not related. This can cause problems when for example an admin is logged in and then wants to login to the site as a "normal user", they do not expect those accounts to be related and do not expect to be logged in automatically as the admin user. This causes headaches for no reason. It also causes a lot of other headaches to implement the recommended related Profile model, you often need to make sure there is a contrib user for every profile and a profile for every contrib user if you for example want to use the authentication decorators. Forms and administration of "users" make this even more cumbersome. In short: usually something will go wrong in this process at some point, it's a curse.
I have mostly abandoned the contrib User model for anything else but for admins. Building another user model is really what you want, but you also want the authenicating part for that user, hence the common use of django contrib User (using it for the wrong reasons). The best solution if you are in a situation like this is to build your own authenication for that custom user model. This is actually quite easy and I cannot recommend this approach enough. I think that the official recommendation is wrong and that there should instead be good tools for authenticating custom user models built into django.
You might want to have a look at the recently created django-primate: https://github.com/aino/django-primate
I once built a custom user model, inheriting from the default one. It works, however, I wouldn't recommend it.
Currently, you have some requirements, but over time they may change. Django's user system is quite straightforward, and using it allows to adapt more easily to some of the most common use cases.
Another aspect to think about, is that there are several applications already available that you can use, and that may require Django's users. Using your own model, may make usage of such modules much more difficult.
On the other hand, hacking the Django's user system in order to comply with your current requirements may be tricky.
Moreover, migrating a 'Custom-User' to a 'Django-User' is always possible, so you are not really closing that door.
Overall, I think it really depends on what you mean with 'user'.
If you mean just a registration, and no real interaction with the core Django features, then I think a separate model is enough, especially because you can migrate at any time, with relatively little effort.
However, if for your application a 'user' maps to something very similar to the what Django is for, then I would use the Django User-Model.
I'm working on a user based, social networking type of web application in Django. It's my first one so I would like to make sure I'm using some good practices.
Currently the web app supports two kinds of users. This is represented by two different Groups. When I register a user I assign them to one of these two groups. I also have two apps, one for each type of user. The apps handle whatever things are distinct to a particular type of user. I have another app that handles the actual authentication. This app uses Django's built in User type and assigns them a UserProfile. The two different types of users have their own profiles which extend/inherit from UserProfile.
This works reasonably well, and is fairly reusable since the authentication app can pull the user type from the url and figure out which type of user to create. Since the groups are named conveniently, they can be added to the correct group too.
Is this the best way or are there more preferred, tried and true ways to handle this? It seems like a pretty common enough scenario. I don't want to continue incorrectly reinventing the wheel if I don't have to.
I was thinking of adding another app called, common, or something which would handle things that are common to all users. For example, viewing a users profile page might be something anyone who is logged in might want to do, regardless of what type of user they are.
Thanks!
Easy part first, with 2) you're spot on. That would be the simplest and most effective way of doing that. It makes sense instead of replicating functionality across both applications to have one app that handles things that are common to both user types.
Back to 1)
With both profiles extending from UserProfile, you'd run into the issue of (if you were using get_profile() on a User object - see http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#storing-additional-information-about-users) that you'd get back just a UserProfile object, not knowing which group the user actually belongs to based on the object received. This is because they both extend UserProfile but UserProfile would not be able to be (I believe) abstract, because you want every User to have a pointer to a UserProfile object which may actually be a UserGroup1 or a UserGroup2 object.
What I would suggest you do is make two seperate Models, that do not extend from the same Model (out of necessity): Group1 and Group2. You would store the information that is common to both profiles in the UserProfile of the User object. Then in the UserProfile you would have a ForeignKey to both a Group1 and a Group2 object:
group1 = models.ForeignKey(Group1, blank=True, null=True)
You would have to do the logic checking yourself, to ensure that only one is ever valid (you could just do this in an overridden save() method or something), but then to grab all of a user's data at once, and also know which group they are on you could do the following:
User.objects.filter(username='blahblah').select_related('profile', 'profile__group1', 'profile__group2')
Only one query to the database would give you all the information you'd need about a user, and you'd also know which group they are in (the one that isn't 'None').
I hope that helps.
P.S. I am assuming in this that groups don't just have unique data to each other, but also unique functionality.
I will be creating an intranet site with multiple roles (client-employee, client-admin, staff team member). Each role will have a model that attaches (via One-to-One or ForeignKey field) to a user with custom fields. I want each role to have it's own set of permissions (like a group).
How can I store this permissions set inside my application. Groups seem to be defined as part of the contrib.admin app rather than in code. I couldn't find anything in documentation on how to define a group.
What is the best way to handle model level permissions. Maybe I could do a check in the model if see if the user has the right role-model.
Access control lists are tricky (some say dead), but Django comes with a good default implementation in contrib.auth equipped with:
Users
Permissions: Binary (yes/no) flags designating whether a user may perform a certain task.
Groups: A generic way of applying labels and permissions to more than one user.
A more detailed introduction can be found here:
http://parand.com/say/index.php/2010/02/19/django-using-the-permission-system/