Views knox.views

Knox provides three views that handle token management for you.

LoginView

This view accepts only a post request with an empty body.

The LoginView accepts the same sort of authentication as your Rest Framework DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES setting. If this is not set, it defaults to (SessionAuthentication, BasicAuthentication).

LoginView was designed to work well with Basic authentication, or similar schemes. If you would like to use a different authentication scheme to the default, you can extend this class to provide your own value for authentication_classes

It is possible to customize LoginView behaviour by overriding the following helper methods: - get_context(self), to change the context passed to the UserSerializer - get_token_ttl(self), to change the token ttl - get_token_limit_per_user(self), to change the number of tokens available for a user - get_user_serializer_class(self), to change the class used for serializing the user - get_expiry_datetime_format(self), to change the datetime format used for expiry - format_expiry_datetime(self, expiry), to format the expiry datetime object at your convenience - create_token(self), to create the AuthToken instance at your convenience

Finally, if none of these helper methods are sufficient, you can also override get_post_response_data to return a fully customized payload.

...snip...
    def get_post_response_data(self, request, token, instance):
        UserSerializer = self.get_user_serializer_class()

        data = {
            'expiry': self.format_expiry_datetime(instance.expiry),
            'token': token
        }
        if UserSerializer is not None:
            data["user"] = UserSerializer(
                request.user,
                context=self.get_context()
            ).data
        return data
...snip...

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When the endpoint authenticates a request, a json object will be returned containing the token key along with the actual value for the key by default. The success response also includes a expiry key with a timestamp for when the token expires.

This is because USER_SERIALIZER setting is None by default.

If you wish to return custom data upon successful authentication like first_name, last_name, and username then the included UserSerializer class can be used inside REST_KNOX settings by adding knox.serializers.UserSerializer

---

Obviously, if your app uses a custom user model that does not have these fields, a custom serializer must be used.

LogoutView

This view accepts only a post request with an empty body. It responds to Knox Token Authentication. On a successful request, the token used to authenticate is deleted from the system and can no longer be used to authenticate.

By default, this endpoint returns a HTTP 204 response on a successful request. To customize this behavior, you can override the get_post_response method, for example to include a body in the logout response and/or to modify the status code:

...snip...
    def get_post_response(self, request):
        return Response({"bye-bye": request.user.username}, status=200)
...snip...

LogoutAllView

This view accepts only a post request with an empty body. It responds to Knox Token Authentication. On a successful request, a HTTP 204 is returned and the token used to authenticate, and all other tokens registered to the same User account, are deleted from the system and can no longer be used to authenticate. The success response can be modified like the LogoutView by overriding the get_post_response method.

Note It is not recommended to alter the Logout views. They are designed specifically for token management, and to respond to Knox authentication. Modified forms of the class may cause unpredictable results.