Google Apps Auth Backend for Django

October 16, 2008 Appirio

Tim Garthwaite

Google loves Python. In fact, Google’s original web spider, which crawls the web to create its search index was written while Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the founders) were still graduate students at Stanford, and rumors abound that it went live written completely in Python. I learned in university that most of the Python code performed well enough that much of the code was still Python to that day (circa 2000), although much of it was highly optimized in platform-specific C. Moreover, Google’s new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), AppEngine, which allows anyone in the world to host complete web applications “in the cloud” for free (heavy use will be charged at far below-market rates), currently supports only one language (you guessed it: Python). While Google has assured that they will release AppEngine SDKs for other languages, only Python is currently supported.

AppEngine, it can be argued, may not be ready for prime-time commercial or enterprise use, as it does not support SSL for all communication between the browser and servers. Authentication can be done safely by redirecting to a secure login page and returning with a token, but the token (and all your corporate data) would then be passed back and forth in plaintext from then on. Google has promised to add SSL support to AppEngine, but until they do, Appirio’s Google Practice has begun recommending the full Django platform (on Apache or, heavens forbid, IIS) for internally developed applications, in anticipation that converting these web applications to AppEngine would be relatively painless.

The AppEngine Python SDK comes with much of the Django framework pre-installed, including its fantastic templating system. Also, the Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) system built into AppEngine is remarkably similar to the ORM that comes with Django, and the AppEngine authentication system is markably similar to its Django equivalent as well. These facts should make conversion from custom in-house Django applications to AppEngine in the future (and throwing out your pesky web servers, gaining the best features of the world’s most robustly distributed compute in the world, in the process) relatively painless.

So let’s say you wish to go ahead with creating Python/Django web applications in-house. Django comes with an authentication framework that allows for custom back-ends, meaning that you can test username/password combinations against an arbitrary back-end system, such as Active Directory or any other LDAP system, or even against users stored in a custom database. For one of Appirio’s clients who is fully embracing the cloud, including Google Mail, Calendar, and Docs corporate-wide, it made the most sense for a certain application to authenticate against Google Apps itself using Google’s Apps Provisioning API. Here’s how I accomplished this.

First, you must create the back-end Python class. For example purposes, I have created a ‘mymodule’ directory (anywhere in my Python path) containing an empty file (telling Python to treat this directory as a module) and the file Of course, you must replace “” with your own domain, and as your Python code base grows, you should adhere to a more logical standard for where you place your libraries. It would make sense to think about this and begin now so you won’t have to refactor your code. In my system, the class file is in the ‘’ module. Here are the contents of this file:

from django.contrib.auth.models include User, check_password
from gdata.apps.service include AppsService
from include DocsService
ADMIN_USERNAME = ‘admin_user’
ADMIN_PASSWORD = ‘p@s$w3rd’
class GoogleAppsBackend:
“”” Authenticate against Google Apps “””
user = None
email = ‘%s@%s’ % (username, DOMAIN)
admin_email = ‘%s@%s’ % (ADMIN_USERNAME, DOMAIN)
# Check user’s password
gdocs = = email
gdocs.password = password
# Get the user object
gapps = AppsService(domain=DOMAIN)
account_type=’HOSTED’, service=’apps’)
guser = gapps.RetreiveUser(username)
user = User.objects.get_or_create(username=username) = email
user.last_name =
user.first_name =
user.is_active = not guser.login.suspended == ‘true’
user.is_superuser = guser.login.admin == ‘true’
user.is_staff = user.is_superuser

return user

def get_user(self, user_id):

user = None


user = User.objects.get(pk=user_id)



return user

Let’s briefly review this code. authenticate() uses the GData Python library to ensure the username and password match with the actual Google Apps account. Since you need an administrator account to use the Provisioning API, I chose an arbitrary user-accessible API (Google Docs) to verify the user’s password. If the password doesn’t match, an exception is thrown, None is returned, and the login fails. If it does match, we log in to the Provisioning API with admin credentials to get the Google Apps user object, guser. Then, using a built-in helper method, we attempt to get the Django User object with matching username, or create a new one. Either way, we take the opportunity to update the User object with data from Apps. get_user() is a required function (as we are creating a class to meet a “duck-type” interface, rather than inheritance). We simply return a Django User, if one exists, or None.

Finally, to enable this back-end, you must modify the site’s file, ensuring ‘django.contrib.auth’ is included in INSTALLED_APPS, and adding ‘mymodule.django_backend.GoogleAppsBackend’ to AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS. You can now test logging into your site as Google Apps users. If you have enabled ‘django.contrib.admin’, you can then login to your site’s admin console and see that these users were automatically added into your Django auth system. You could also easily create a web page to list these users by passing ‘users’: User.objects.all() into a template and writing template code such as:

    {%foreach user in users%}
  • {{}}
  • {%endfor%}

We hope you find this code useful. Feel free to use any or all of it in your own Django web applications. If you do, please let us know in the comments!

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