Authenticate in Django without a database

Question

I have a Django app that gets it's data completely from apis. so I don't have to use database. Session data is stored on signed cookies. I tried to code a custom User model and a custom auth backend like on the docs, but I get the following error: django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: AUTH_USER_MODEL refers to model 'my_app.MyUser' that has not been installed

My settings.py:

AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'my_app.MyUser'
AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = ('django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',
                           'my_app.backends.LoginAuthBackend',)

models.py:

class MyUser(object):
    def save(self):
        pass
    objects = None
    username = ""

Here, If a try use the AbstractUser from django instead of Object I got the following error: AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute '_meta' or the db table doesn't exit.

backends.py

class LoginAuthBackend(object):
    def authenticate(self, username=None, password=None):
        if username and password:
           try:
               response = my_auth_function(username, password)
               if response.status_code == 200:
                   token = response.get('my_key')
                   user = MyUser()
                   return user
            except MyCustomException:
                  return None

It's drives me crazy. Looks like Django that's not easy to use without a DB.

EDIT

After several of tries, a simple way to solve this is remove 'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend' from AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS and AUTH_USER_MODEL from settings. The model continues basically the same way. works smoothly

Yes, Django is very dependent on database. It was designed this way. It looks like Django authentication system really wants you to have a User model and will not work without one. You could try harder to fool Django into accepting a fake model, but you would have to implement a whole bunch of interfaces specific to model instances and querysets. — Mad Wombat, Apr 11 '16 at 18:38

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 08 '17 at 06:08

The default set of authentication back-end processors is defined in the AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS setting. See the Django documentation for Customizing authentication.

By default, AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS is set to:
['django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend']
That’s the basic authentication backend that checks the Django users database and queries the built-in permissions.

So, if you don't want the django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend authentication method, remove that from the list. You'll probably want to find (or create) a different one and add that to the list.

Authenticate in Django without a database

EDIT

1 Answers1