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Authenticating against Django’s user database from Apache

Since keeping multiple authentication databases in sync is a common problem when dealing with Apache, you can configuring Apache to authenticate against Django’s authentication system directly. This requires Apache version >= 2.2 and mod_wsgi >= 2.0. For example, you could:

• Serve static/media files directly from Apache only to authenticated users.
• Authenticate access to a Subversion repository against Django users with a certain permission.
• Allow certain users to connect to a WebDAV share created with mod_dav.

Configuring Apache

To check against Django’s authorization database from a Apache configuration file, you’ll need to set ‘wsgi’ as the value of AuthBasicProvider or AuthDigestProvider directive and then use the WSGIAuthUserScript directive to set the path to your authentification script:

<Location /example/>
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "example.com"
    AuthBasicProvider wsgi
    WSGIAuthUserScript /usr/local/wsgi/scripts/auth.wsgi
    Require valid-user
</Location>

Your auth.wsgi script will have to implement either a check_password(environ, user, password) function (for AuthBasicProvider) or a get_realm_hash(environ, user, realm) function (for AuthDigestProvider).

See the mod_wsgi documentation for more details about the implementation of such a solution.

Last update:

May 20, 2012

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