django-sesame provides one-click login for your Django project. It uses specially crafted URLs containing an authentication token, for example: http://example.com/?url_auth_token=AAAAARchl18CIQUlImmbV9q7PZk%3A89AEU34b0JLSrkT8Ty2RPISio5

It's useful if you want to share private content without requiring your visitors to remember a username and a password or to go through an authentication process involving a third-party.

django-sesame is tested with:

• Django 1.4 (LTS), 1.6 and 1.7,
• all supported Python versions (except Python 2.5 for Django 1.4).

It requires django.contrib.auth. It uses django.contrib.session when it's available.

Technically, django-sesame can provide stateless authenticated navigation without django.contrib.sessions, provided all internal links include the authentication token. But that increases the security issues explained below.

django-sesame is released under the BSD license, like Django itself.

Before using django-sesame in your project, you should review the following advice carefully.

The major security weakness in django-sesame is a direct consequence of the feature it implements: whoever obtains an authentication token will be able to log in to your website. URLs end up in countless insecure places: browser history, proxy logs, etc. You can't avoid that. So use django-sesame only for mundane things, like photos from your holidays. If a data leak would seriously affect you, don't use this software. You have been warned.

Otherwise, a reasonable attempt has been made to provide a secure solution. django-sesame uses Django's signing framework to create signed tokens.

Tokens are linked to the primary key and the password of the User. Changing the password invalidates the token. Provided your authentication backend uses salted passwords — I hope it does — the token is invalidated even if the new password is identical to the old one.

By default, tokens never expire. If you want them to expire after a given amount of time, set the SESAME_MAX_AGE setting to a duration in seconds. Then each token will contain the time it was generated at and django-sesame will check if it's still valid at each login attempt.

1. Add sesame.backends.ModelBackend to AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS:

   AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS += 'sesame.backends.ModelBackend',

2. Add sesame.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware to MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES:

   MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES += 'sesame.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',

3. Generate authentication tokens with sesame.utils.get_query_string(user).

That's all!

The sesame.utils module provides two functions to generate authentication tokens.

1. get_query_string(user) returns a complete query string that you can append to any URL to enable one-click login.

2. get_parameters(user) returns a dictionary of GET parameters to add to the query string, if you're already building one.