Django rest-framework JWT authentication

If you ever worked with Django REST framework, then you surely know about JWT authentication. JWT authentication is used for token authentication and it is really a popular method for authentication in Django. JWT stand for JSON Web Token. Let's see how to work with it.

First, install a package −

pip install djangorestframework-simplejwt
pip install djangorestframework

We are not going to need an App for this, we will just do a basic setup for Django REST framework frontend and authentication backend.

Example

In settings.py, add the following −

INSTALLED_APPS = [
...
'rest_framework_simplejwt',
'rest_framework'
...
]
REST_FRAMEWORK = {
'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': (
'rest_framework_simplejwt.authentication.JWTAuthentication',
   )
}

Here, we added the rest_framework and JWT auth framework as an app and for authentication backend, we added JWT auth.

In project's urls.py −

from django.urls import path
from rest_framework_simplejwt.views import (
   TokenObtainPairView,
   TokenRefreshView,
)
urlpatterns = [
   path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
   path('api/token/', TokenObtainPairView.as_view(), name='t
oken_obtain_pair'),
   path('api/token/refresh/', TokenRefreshView.as_view(), na
me='token_refresh'),
]

Here, we added two extra urls, one is for generating token in with username and password and the other is for authentication using generated token.

Output