Step by Step Guide to use Sign in with Twitter with Django

If you will have a look at OAuth examples on twitter apiwiki there are already examples available to use Sign in with Twitter with Django, so why this new howto and example code. Because being a perfectionist I like things to be the standard way, so for authentication django allows you to specify your own customized authentication backends. I thought why should not that be utilized to authenticate the Django User object with twitter.

There are few pre-requisites listed below in the order they are needed:

• simplejson
• oauth
• python-twitter
• oauth-python-twitter
• TwitterBackend from djangosnippets.org

This guide assumes that simplejson, oauth, python-twitter and oauth-python-twitter are already on your python path.

1. Now create a new Django project: twitterapp

django-admin startproject

2. Change to the project directory.

3. Now start a new app inside the project

python manage.py startapp twitterauth

4. Create a new directory: backends

mkdir backends

5. Change to the backends directory and create 2 new empty files.

cd backends
touch __init__.py
touch twitteroauth.py

6. Copy the code from TwitterBackend into the empty file: twitteroauth.py

7. Now configure your settings.py and add/edit following configuration variables

CONSUMER_KEY = "Your consumer key from twitter"

CONSUMER_SECRET = "You consumer secret from twitter"

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
    'backends.twitteroauth.TwitterBackend',
    'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',
)

AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE = "twitterauth.UserProfile"

8. Now goto the twitterauth app directory and create a UserProfile module and post save signal processor as follows:

from django.db import models
from django.db.models.signals import post_save
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
class UserProfile(models.Model):
	user = models.ForeignKey(User)
	access_token = models.CharField(max_length=255, blank=True, null=True, editable=False)
	profile_image_url = models.URLField(blank=True, null=True)
	location = models.CharField(max_length=100, blank=True, null=True)
	url = models.URLField(blank=True, null=True)
	description = models.CharField(max_length=160, blank=True, null=True)

	def __str__(self):
		return "%s's profile" % self.user

def create_user_profile(sender, instance, created, **kwargs):
	if created:
		profile, created = UserProfile.objects.get_or_create(user=instance)

post_save.connect(create_user_profile, sender=User)

9. Now modify your views.py in twitterauth app directory as following:

from django.conf import settings
from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect, HttpResponse
from django.contrib.auth import login, authenticate

from oauthtwitter import OAuthApi
import oauth

CONSUMER_KEY = getattr(settings, 'CONSUMER_KEY', 'YOUR_KEY')
CONSUMER_SECRET = getattr(settings, 'CONSUMER_SECRET', 'YOUR_SECRET')

def twitter_signin(request):
	twitter = OAuthApi(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
	request_token = twitter.getRequestToken()
	request.session['request_token'] = request_token.to_string()
	signin_url = twitter.getSigninURL(request_token)
	return HttpResponseRedirect(signin_url)

def twitter_return(request):
	request_token = request.session.get('request_token', None)

	# If there is no request_token for session,
	#    means we didn't redirect user to twitter
	if not request_token:
		# Redirect the user to the login page,
		# So the user can click on the sign-in with twitter button
		return HttpResponse("We didn't redirect you to twitter...")

	token = oauth.OAuthToken.from_string(request_token)

	# If the token from session and token from twitter does not match
	#   means something bad happened to tokens
	if token.key != request.GET.get('oauth_token', 'no-token'):
		del request.session['request_token']
		# Redirect the user to the login page
		return HttpResponse("Something wrong! Tokens do not match...")

	twitter = OAuthApi(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, token)
	access_token = twitter.getAccessToken()

	request.session['access_token'] = access_token.to_string()
	auth_user = authenticate(access_token=access_token)

	# if user is authenticated then login user
	if auth_user:
		login(request, auth_user)
	else:
		# We were not able to authenticate user
		# Redirect to login page
		del request.session['access_token']
		del request.session['request_token']
		return HttpResponse("Unable to authenticate you!")

	# authentication was successful, use is now logged in
	return HttpResponse("You are logged in")

10. Add the following 2 lines to urls.py at correct location.

    url('^login/$', twitter_signin, name='login'),
    url('^return/$', twitter_return, name='return'),

11. Now start the django devevelopment server

python manage.py runserver


12. Goto http://localhost:8000/login and you will be redirected to user for authentication, and if everything wents well you will see the message that your are logged in.

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