How can i make django-rest-framework-jwt return token on registration?

Question 1: To generate tokens manually on registration you can define and make use of a method like this:

import jwt
from rest_framework_jwt.utils import jwt_payload_handler

def create_token(user):
    payload = jwt_payload_handler(user)
    token = jwt.encode(payload, settings.SECRET_KEY)
    return token.decode('unicode_escape')

you can add this method to the view and generate the token once the user has been registered and return it in the response.

Question 2: JWT tokens do not need to be stored in the database. You can read more about how JWT works at http://jwt.io/.

Question 3 and 4: To use tokens to limit access to a specific view, especially an APIView or one of its subclasses or a view provided by Django Rest framework, you need to specify the permission classes. for example:

from rest_framework.permissions import IsAuthenticated
from rest_framework.response import Response
from rest_framework.views import APIView

class ExampleView(APIView):
    permission_classes = (IsAuthenticated,)

    def get(self, request, format=None):
        content = {
            'status': 'request was permitted'
        }
        return Response(content)

Question 5: One potential loophole while working with Django Rest Framework is the default permissions that you setup from the settings of your application; if for example you AllowAny in the settings it'll make all the views publicly accessible unless you specifically override the permission classes in each view.

The Accepted answer has some code that generates token but it doesn't show how to integrate it in serializer/view. Also not sure that manual jwt.encode is a good modern way of doing this if we already have jwt_encode_handler to do this. You can create SerializerMethodField and create tokens there:

token = serializers.SerializerMethodField()

def get_token(self, obj):
    jwt_payload_handler = api_settings.JWT_PAYLOAD_HANDLER
    jwt_encode_handler = api_settings.JWT_ENCODE_HANDLER

    payload = jwt_payload_handler(obj)
    token = jwt_encode_handler(payload)
    return token

Then add token field to Meta.fields.

Working Example