Zero Footprint Python-Social-Auth authentication

Question

My site has regular users that use the django default User model, but for one particular functionality, I want people to be able to login using their social accounts (twitter, fb..etc) using python-social-auth without having these logins saved in the database with the user model (no accounts created, no ability to do certain normal user tasks) and with a session timeout.

I looked around for ways to do that but my little research bore no fruit. Any ideas?

Summary:

1. Separation between normal users and social (so I can limit what social auth'd users can do)
2. Session timeout for social auth'd users
3. No addition in the User table for social auth'd users (no footprint).
4. Optional: Obtain their social username and id for logging purposes.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can differentiate the social user by adding a custom user model for python-social-auth by adding the setting SOCIAL_AUTH_USER_MODEL . Check the setting docs at http://psa.matiasaguirre.net/docs/configuration/settings.html#user-model

Answer 2

I would try to approach this problem by using django.contrib.auth.models.Group and django.contrib.auth.models.Permission . Create one general group with custom permissions to your apps' functionality and add all your normal users to that.

Save accounts created by python-social-auth in default django.contrib.auth.models.User but create seperate Group without any permissions for them.

If necessary create some scheduled task ( either with cronjob or Celery ) which will go through users and deactivate/delete those who expired.