User Authentication

User Authentication

To be able to use the application, a user needs to

• Register
• Confirm their Email
• Login

Currently, JWT Authentication is being used to authenticate users. There are 2 types of users now- Admin and Student. This feature needs to be extended to include various user-levels including; mentors, volunteers, applicants, contributors, maintainers and so on. Other Login and Register methods which need to be applied:

• OAuth using GitHub
• OAuth using Google

How it works

User Authentication is JSONWebToken (JWT) based. To implement this we use a djangorestframework extension, djangorestframework-simplejwt. You can see an example of basic usage with this extension here.

In short, when a user logs in, the user will receive an authentication token (e.g.: access_token) which contains part of the user's identity and other token related fields, as the refresh token.

You can get an access token once you are registered into the backend.

The user can then use this access_token when using a protected/restricted API, such as GET /user API. To access this the client has to send the access_token in the header of the HTTP request, following this format: Authorization: Bearer $(access_token). In this application, the access_token has been stored in the localStorage as an item and sent as a header in every request which requires authentication.