Can I use HTTP Basic Authentication with Django?

This has been added to the Django 1.3 release. See more current documentation for this here: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/auth-remote-user/

Do check out Oli's links. You basically see the authenticated username as verified by Basic HTTP Authentication in Django by looking at request.META['REMOTE_USER'].

Update: Tested the proposed patch for ticket #689, which is available up-to-date in telenieko's git repository here. It applies cleanly at least on revision 9084 of Django.

Activate the remote user authentication backend by

• adding the RemoteUserAuthMiddleware after AuthenticationMiddleware
• adding the setting AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = ('django.contrib.auth.backends.RemoteUserAuthBackend',)

If you use lighttpd and FastCGI like I do, activate mod_auth, create credentials for a test user (I called it testuser and set 123 as the password) and configure the Django site to require basic authentication.

The following urls.py can be used to test the setup:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(regex='^$',
        view=lambda request: HttpResponse(repr(request), 'text/plain')),

    url(regex='^user/$',
        view=lambda request: HttpResponse(repr(request.user), 'text/plain')),

    url(regex='^users/$',
        view=lambda request: HttpResponse(
            ','.join(u.username for u in User.objects.all()),
            'text/plain')),
)

After reloading lighty and the Django FCGI server, loading the root of the site now asks for authentication and accepts the testuser credentials, and then outputs a dump of the request object. In request.META these new properties should be present:

'AUTH_TYPE': 'Basic'
'HTTP_AUTHORIZATION': 'Basic dGVzdHVzZXI6MTIz'
'REMOTE_USER': 'testuser'

The /user/ URL can be used to check that you're indeed logged in as testuser:

<User: testuser>

And the /users/ URL now lists the automatically added testuser (here the admin user I had created when doing syncdb is also shown):

admin,testuser

If you don't want to patch Django, it's trivial to detach the RemoteUserAuthBackend and RemoteUserAuthMiddleware classes into a separate module and refer to that in the Django settings.

For just supporting basic auth on some requests (and not mucking with the web server -- which is how someone might interpret your question title), you will want to look here:

http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/243/