Django Mail Auth

Django Mail Auth is a lightweight authentication backend for Django, that does not require users to remember passwords.

Django Mail Auth features:

• custom user model support
• drop in Django admin support
• drop in Django User replacement
• drop in Wagtail login replacement
• extendable SMS support

This project was inspired by:

• Is it time for password-less login? by Ben Brown
• LOGIN WITHOUT PASSWORD MOST SECURE | WAIT.. WHAT? by Joris Snoek
• django-nopassword by Rolf Erik Lekang

Sponsors

Installation

Run this command to install django-mail-auth:

python3 -m pip install django-mail-auth[postgres,wagtail]

Use the [wagtail] extra to make sure you get a supported version of wagtail, if you use that.

If you want to use the PostgreSQL CIText extension for optimized case-insensitive search, use the [postgres] extra to install the necessary django-citext. You also need to make sure postgresql itself supports the CIText extension, for instance by installing a package like postgresql-contrib or compiling it with the extension included.

Setup

First add mailauth to you installed apps:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # Django's builtin apps…
    "mailauth",
    "mailauth.contrib.admin",  # optional
    "mailauth.contrib.user",  # optional
    # optional, must be included before "wagtail.admin"
    "mailauth.contrib.wagtail",
    # other apps…
]

mailauth.contrib.admin is optional and will replace the admin's login with token based authentication too.

mailauth.contrib.user is optional and provides a new Django User model. The new User model needs to be enabled via the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting:

# This setting should be either "EmailUser" or
# any custom subclass of "AbstractEmailUser"
AUTH_USER_MODEL = "mailauth_user.EmailUser"

# optional, Wagtail only
WAGTAILUSERS_PASSWORD_ENABLED = False

Next you will need to add the new authentication backend:

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
    # default, but now optional
    # This should be removed if you use mailauth.contrib.user or any other
    # custom user model that does not have a username/password
    "django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend",
    # The new access token based authentication backend
    "mailauth.backends.MailAuthBackend",
)

Django's ModelBackend is only needed, if you still want to support password based authentication. If you don't, simply remove it from the list.

Last but not least, go to your URL root configuration urls.py and add the following:

from django.urls import path


urlpatterns = [
    path("accounts/", include("mailauth.urls")),
    # optional, must be before "wagtail.admin.urls"
    path("", include("mailauth.contrib.wagtail.urls")),
]

That's it!