This package implements an authentication policy for Pyramid that using JSON Web Tokens. This standard (RFC 7519) is often used to secure backens APIs. The excellent PyJWT library is used for the JWT encoding / decoding logic.

Enabling JWT support in a Pyramid application is very simple:

from pyramid.config import Configurator
from pyramid.authorization import ACLAuthorizationPolicy

def main():
    config = Configurator()
    # Pyramid requires an authorization policy to be active.
    config.set_authorization_policy(ACLAuthorizationPolicy())
    # Enable JWT authentication.
    config.include('pyramid_jwt')
    config.set_jwt_authentication_policy('secret')

This will set a JWT authentication policy using the Authorization HTTP header with a JWT scheme to retrieve tokens. Using another HTTP header is trivial:

config.set_jwt_authentication_policy('secret', http_header='X-My-Header')

To make creating valid tokens easier a new create_jwt_token method is added to the request. You can use this in your view to create tokens. A simple authentication view for a REST backend could look something like this:

@view_config('login', request_method='POST', renderer='json')
def login(request):
    login = request.POST['login']
    password = request.POST['password']
    user_id = authenticate(login, password)  # You will need to implement this.
    if user_id:
        return {
            'result': 'ok',
            'token': request.create_jwt_token(user_id)
        }
    else:
        return {
            'result': 'error'
        }

Since JWT is typically used via HTTP headers and does not use cookies the standard remember() and forget() functions from Pyramid are not useful. Trying to use them while JWT authentication is enabled will result in a warning.

Normally pyramid_jwt only makes a single JWT claim: the subject (or sub claim) is set to the principal. You can also add extra claims to the token by passing keyword parameters to the create_jwt_token method.

token = request.create_jwt_token(user.id,
    name=user.name,
    admin=(user.role == 'admin'))

All claims found in a JWT token can be accessed through the jwt_claims dictionary property on a request. For the above example you can retrieve the name and admin-status for the user directly from the request:

print('User id: %d' % request.authenticated_userid)
print('Users name: %s', request.jwt_claims['name'])
if request.jwt_claims['admin']:
   print('This user is an admin!')

Keep in mind that data jwt_claims only reflects the claims from a JWT token and do not check if the user is valid: the callback configured for the authentication policy is not checked. For this reason you should always use request.authenticated_userid instead of request.jwt_claims['sub'].

There are a number of flags that specify how tokens are created and verified. You can either set this in your .ini-file, or pass/override them directly to the config.set_jwt_authentication_policy() function.