how do i set my authentication backend as default in settings.py file of my django project(Extended AbstractBaseUser model)

Question

I have written the following class for Auth Back end and placed it inside a file "authentication.py" inside the app directory:

from events.models import User

class authBackend():
    def authenticate(self, request, username, passwprd):
        try:
            user = User.objects.get(rollNo=username)
            success = user.check_password(password)
            if success:
                return user
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            pass
        return None

    def get_user(self, uid):
        try:
            return User.objects.get(pk=Uid)
        except:
            return None

then i added (or at least i thought i did) it to settings.py:

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = [
    'events.authentication'
]

this is how i am logging in the user:

def login_view(request):
    if request.method == "POST":

        # Attempt to sign user in
        rollno = request.POST["rollno"]
        password = request.POST["password"]

        user = authenticate(request, username=rollno, password=password)

        # Check if authentication successful
        if user is not None:
            login(request, user)
            return HttpResponseRedirect(reverse("events:index"))
        else:
            return render(request, "events/login.html", {
                "message": "Invalid roll number and/or password."
            })
    else:
        return render(request, "events/login.html")

But i am getting the following trace back:

ImportError at /login Module "events" does not define a "authentication" attribute/class

I am a noob and i am pretty sure i am doing something wrong, i just don't understand what it is.

Can someone please tell me how to do it right?

Answer 1

You need to import it with the class name as well, so:

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = [
    
]

In your authBackend , you also made a number of mistakes. First of all the authentication backend needs to implement a number of functions [Django-doc] :

The user model and its manager will delegate permission lookup functions ( get_user_permissions() , get_group_permissions() , get_all_permissions() , has_perm() , has_module_perms() , and with_perm() ) to any authentication backend that implements these functions.

You thus will need to implement this functions as well. Therefore it might be better to inherit from the BaseBackend [Django-doc] or perhaps even better from the ModelBackend , since that will already implement the logic, and you thus only need to override certain functions to let it work with your new model.

You also made a typo in the parameter names: it is password , not passwprd :

from django.contrib.auth.backends import 
from events.models import User

class authBackend():
    def authenticate(self, request, username):
        try:
            user = User.objects.get(rollNo=username)
            success = user.check_password()
            if success:
                return user
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            pass
        return None

    def get_user(self, uid):
        try:
            return User.objects.get(pk=Uid)
        except:
            return None

---

Note : According to the PEP-8 Style guide [pep-0008] , class names are written in PerlCase starting with an uppercase, so you might want to consider renaming authBackend to AuthBackend .