The tokenauth app provides a set of models, decorators, and a custom authentication backend that can be used to add simple token-based authentication to a Django project.

An access token has the following characteristics:

1. It is valid for a single user and resource combination.
2. It expires after a period of time automatically. By default this is two hours but it's configurable.

from tokenauth.models import AccessToken

token = AccessToken.create_token(resource, user)

is_valid, token = AccessToken.validate(access_token_as_string, resource_id)
if is_valid:
    ... # do something
else:
    ... # do something else

More examples in the documentation.