Porting from django-social-auth

Being a derivative work from django-social-auth, porting from it to python-social-auth should be an easy task. Porting to others libraries usually is a pain, I’m trying to make this as easy as possible.

Installed apps

On django-social-auth there was a single application to add into INSTALLED_APPS plus a setting to define which ORM to be used (default or MongoEngine). Now the apps are split and there’s not need for that extra setting.

When using the default ORM:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'social_django',
    ...
)

And when using MongoEngine:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'social_django_mongoengine',
    ...
)

The models table names were defined to be compatible with those used on django-social-auth, so data is not needed to be migrated.

URLs

The URLs are namespaced, you can chose your namespace, the example app uses the social namespace. Replace the old include with:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    ...
    url('', include('social_django.urls', namespace='social'))
    ...
)

On templates use a namespaced URL:

{% url 'social:begin' "google-oauth2" %}

Account disconnection URL would be:

{% url 'social:disconnect_individual' provider, id %}

Porting settings

All python-social-auth settings are prefixed with SOCIAL_AUTH_, except for some exception on Django framework, AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS remains the same for obvious reasons.

All backends settings have the backend name included in the name, all uppercase and with dashes replaced with underscores. For example, the Google OAuth2 backend is named google-oauth2, so setting names related to that backend should start with SOCIAL_AUTH_GOOGLE_OAUTH2_.

Keys and secrets are some mandatory settings needed for OAuth providers; to keep consistency the names follow the same naming convention: *_KEY for the application key, and *_SECRET for the secret. OAuth1 backends used to have CONSUMER in the setting name but not anymore. Following with the Google OAuth2 example:

SOCIAL_AUTH_GOOGLE_OAUTH2_KEY = '...'
SOCIAL_AUTH_GOOGLE_OAUTH2_SECRET = '...'

Remember that the name of the backend is needed in the settings, and names differ a little from backend to backend; for instance the Facebook OAuth2 backend name is facebook. So the settings should be:

SOCIAL_AUTH_FACEBOOK_KEY = '...'
SOCIAL_AUTH_FACEBOOK_SECRET = '...'

Authentication backends

Import path for authentication backends changed a little, there’s no more contrib module, there’s no need for it. Some backends changed the names to have some consistency. Check the backends, it should be easy to track the names changes. Examples of the new import paths:

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
    'social_core.backends.open_id.OpenIdAuth',
    'social_core.backends.google.GoogleOpenId',
    'social_core.backends.google.GoogleOAuth2',
    'social_core.backends.google.GoogleOAuth',
    'social_core.backends.twitter.TwitterOAuth',
    'social_core.backends.facebook.FacebookOAuth2',
)

Session

Django stores the last authentication backend used in the user session as an import path; this can cause import troubles when porting since the old import paths aren’t valid anymore. Some solutions to this problem are:

  1. Clean the session and force the users to login again in your site

  2. Run a migration script that will update the authentication backend session value for each session in your database. This implies figuring out the new import path for each backend you have configured, which is the value used in AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS setting.

    @tomgruner created a Gist here that updates the value just for Facebook backend. A template for this script would look like this:

    from django.contrib.sessions.models import Session
    
    BACKENDS = {
        'social_auth.backends.facebook.FacebookBackend': 'social_core.backends.facebook.FacebookOAuth2'
    }
    
    for sess in Session.objects.iterator():
        session_dict = sess.get_decoded()
    
        if '_auth_user_backend' in session_dict.keys():
            # Change old backend import path from new backend import path
            if session_dict['_auth_user_backend'].startswith('social_auth'):
                session_dict['_auth_user_backend'] = BACKENDS[session_dict['_auth_user_backend']]
                new_sess = Session.objects.save(sess.session_key, session_dict, sess.expire_date)
                print 'New session saved {}'.format(new_sess.pk)
    
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