allowedflare 2026.29.1

Authenticate to Django with JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) signed by Cloudflare Access. A Django reimplementation of https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/identity/authorization-cookie/validating-json/#python-example

To run the demo, set the following environment variables:

export ALLOWEDFLARE_ACCESS_URL=https://your-organization.cloudflareaccess.com
export ALLOWEDFLARE_AUDIENCE=64-character hexadecimal string
export ALLOWEDFLARE_PRIVATE_DOMAIN=your-domain.tld

Then run

docker compose up

Configure Cloudflare Tunnel public hostname demodj.your-domain.tld to http://localhost:8001 or equivalent.

Customizing user setup

On every authenticated request, the backend calls configure_user(user, request, created), which by default makes the user staff and grants all view_* permissions to an allowedflare_everyone group so everyone can browse the admin site read-only. Set ALLOWEDFLARE_CONFIGURE_USER in settings to replace it.

The default re-checks group permissions on every request (a few queries). If you'd rather pay nothing on the request path, do per-user setup only on creation and sync group permissions at post_migrate — the only moment new permissions can come into existence:

# settings.py
def ALLOWEDFLARE_CONFIGURE_USER(user, request, created):
    from yourapp.allowedflare_user import configure_user
    return configure_user(user, request, created)

# yourapp/allowedflare_user.py
from django.contrib.auth.models import Group, Permission

def configure_user(user, request, created):
    if created:
        user.is_staff = True
        user.save()
        everyone, _ = Group.objects.get_or_create(name='allowedflare_everyone')
        user.groups.add(everyone)
    return user

def sync_everyone_permissions(sender, **kwargs):
    everyone, _ = Group.objects.get_or_create(name='allowedflare_everyone')
    missing = Permission.objects.filter(codename__startswith='view').exclude(group=everyone)
    if missing.exists():
        everyone.permissions.add(*missing)

# yourapp/apps.py
from django.apps import AppConfig
from django.db.models.signals import post_migrate

class YourAppConfig(AppConfig):
    name = 'yourapp'

    def ready(self):
        from yourapp.allowedflare_user import sync_everyone_permissions
        post_migrate.connect(sync_everyone_permissions, weak=False)

TODO

• Iterate on the same-origin (re-)authenticating proxy
  • From-scratch reimplementation of https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/identity/authorization-cookie/cors/#send-authentication-token-with-cloudflare-worker
  • Setting username so it can be logged by gunicorn
  • Setting the XmlHttpRequest(?) header to avoid redirects to the sign-in page
• Iterate on Admin site ModelBackend
  • http://localhost:8001/admin/login/ text when authenticated is "You are authenticated as , but are not authorized to access this page. Would you like to login to a different account?"
• Expand unit test coverage
• Basic integration and end-to-end tests
• mTLS support and testing
• Configure PostgreSQL
  • Post-migration hook to create a readonly DB user
  • Use the readonly DB user for django-sql-explorer and jupyterhub
  • Update the django-sql-explorer allowlist to accept SET since it's only dangerous for MySQL
  • Exclude only specific fields, like password hash, from the django-sql-explorer view of the django.contrib.auth schema
  • See if admin site change history fields can be shown in the django-sql-explorer schema viewer

Open Questions

• Do existing projects like django-allauth or https://django-rest-framework-simplejwt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html already provide this functionality?
• What about RemoteUserMiddleware?
• Are there Free/Libre/Open Source alternatives to Cloudflare Access and Okta that I can run end-to-end tests against?