Token Authentication In DRF

Token Authentication is one of the built-in authentication system in Django Rest Framework. Token Authentication is an one time token that is generate for every newly created users, which is unique and static.

Let's Setup Token Authentication

Requirements

Make sure you have already installed these :

1. Python
   
2. Django
   
3. Django Rest Framework
   

To use Token Authentication, you need to add 'rest_framework.authtoken' in INSTALLED_APPS

INSTALLED_APPS = [

  'rest_framework.authtoken'

]

and also you need to configure the authentication classes to include TokenAuthentication

REST_FRAMEWORK = {

     'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': [

             'rest_framework.authentication.TokenAuthentication'

     ]
}

Either you can set the TokenAuthentication globally or in a particular view.

You also need to hit the migrate command to successfully create a Token model in database, as rest_framework.authtoken comes with the Token model.

python manage.py migrate

So, this Token model basically used to store the unique token of a particular user.

If you want to check the Token model in django admin, just open admin.py file and register the Token model.

from django.contrib import admin
from rest_framework.authtoken.models import Token

admin.site.register(Token)

Find out the complete blog on Token Authentication