Authentication

Introduction

Masonite comes with some authentication out of the box. Nothing is too opinionated to be restrictive so Masonite leaves it really customizable but gives you a great starting point.

The concept of authentication is a "Guard" concept. Guards are simply authentication logic for different scenarios. For example if you are building an API you might have an api guard but if you are building for a normal web app you might use a web guard. You can put different routes behind different guards to give you an ultimate level of control.

Configuration

There is a single config/auth.py configuration file which you can use to set the authentication behavior of your Masonite project. The default configuration looks something like:

AUTH = {
    'defaults': {
        'guard': env('AUTH_GUARD', 'web')
    },
    'guards': {
        'web': {
            'driver': 'cookie',
            'model': User,
            'drivers': { # 'cookie', 'jwt'
                'jwt': {
                    'reauthentication': True,
                    'lifetime': '5 minutes'
                }
            }
        },
    }
}

You can set the default guard to use in the defaults key. From there you can set various different settings based on which guard you need inside the guards key. Each guard takes a few different settings like the driver the guard will use, the model, and then driver settings here.

If you wish to change the authentication model, to a Company model for example, feel free to do in this configuration file.

This would look something like:

from app.Company import Company

AUTH = {
    'defaults': {
        'guard': env('AUTH_GUARD', 'web')
    },
    'guards': {
        'web': {
            'driver': 'cookie',
            'model': Company,
            'drivers': { # 'cookie', 'jwt'
                'jwt': {
                    'reauthentication': True,
                    'lifetime': '5 minutes'
                }
            }
        },
    }
}

The cookie driver will set a token as a cookie and then fetch the user from the database on every request. For most applications this is fine although you are making an additional query per request just to fetch the user.

This is the most basic authentication driver.

JWT Driver

The JWT driver will store an encrypted JWT token inside a cookie with all the authenticated user information. Then when the authenticated user goes to the page, the JWT token is decrypted and fills in the data on the user model without having to recall the database. Use this option for high traffic sites that you don't want making that extra database call on every request.

There are also 2 options you can set as well. The first option is how long until the jwt token expires. By default this is 5 minutes but you can extend it out longer:

    'jwt': {
        'reauthentication': True,
        'lifetime': '5 minutes'
    }

The second option is whether or not the user should reauthenticate with the database after their token has expired. If set to False, the token will simply continue to refill the user model and set a new token all without touching the database. If set to True it will cancel out the token and reauthenticate with the database to create a new token.

Authentication Model

Again the default authentication model is the app/User model which out of the box comes with a __auth__ class attribute. This attribute should be set to the column that you want to authenticate with when a user logs in.

Authentication Column

By default your app/User model will default to the email column but if you wish to change this to another column such as name, you can do so here. This will lead your model to look like:

class User(Model):

    __fillable__ = ['name', 'email', 'password']

    __auth__ = 'name'

Multiple Authentication Columns

Sometimes your application will be able to either login by email OR by username. You can do this by specifying the __auth__ attribute as a list of columns:

class User(Model):

    __fillable__ = ['name', 'email', 'password']

    __auth__ = ['name', 'email']

Now you can do something like "Please enter Username or Email".

Password Column

By default, Masonite will use the password column to authenticate as the password. Some applications may have this changed. Your specific application may be authenticating with a token column for example.

You can change the password column by speciyfing the __password__ attribute to the column name:

class User(Model):

    __fillable__ = ['name', 'email', 'password']

    __auth__ = ['name']
    __password__ = 'token'

Authenticating a Model

If you want to authenticate a model, you can use the Auth class that ships with Masonite. This is simply a class that is used to authenticate models with a .login() method.

In order to authenticate a model this will look like:

from masonite.auth import Auth

def show(self, request: Request, auth: Auth):
    auth.login('user@email.com', 'password')

This will find a model with the supplied username, check if the password matches using bcrypt and return the model. If it is not found or the password does not match, it will return False.

Again all authenticating models need to have a password column. The column being used to authenticate, such as a username or email field can be specified in the model using the __auth__ class attribute.

Changing The Authentication Column

You may change the column to be authenticated by simply changing the column value of the __auth__ class attribute. This will look something like:

class User(Model):

    __fillable__ = ['name', 'email', 'password']

    __auth__ = 'email'

This will look inside the email column now and check that column and password. The authentication column is email by default.

Changing The Guard

The above examples will use the default guard. You can change the guard on the fly by doing:

from masonite.auth import Auth

def show(self, request: Request, auth: Auth):
    auth.guard('api').login('user@email.com', 'password')

This will now use the api guard (if one existed).

Changing the Guard in Routes

Masonite ships with a guard middleware which allows you to switch the guard based on the route. For example if you had an API route you might want to use an api guard you have created:

Get('/api/users').middleware('guard:api')

Or you may want to use route groups:

RouteGroup([
    Get('/api/users'),
    Get('/api/settings'),
    Get('/api/posts'),
], middleware=('guard:api',))

Creating an Authentication System

You may of course feel free to roll your own authentication system if you so choose but Masonite comes with one out of the box but left out by default. In order to scaffold this authentication system you can of course use a craft command:

$ python craft auth

This will create some controllers, views and routes for you. This command should be used primarily on fresh installs of Masonite but as long as the controllers do not have the same names as the controllers being scaffolded, you will not have any issues.

The views scaffolded will be located under resources/templates/auth.

After you have ran the craft auth command, just run the server and navigate to http://localhost:8000/login and you will now have a login, registration and dashboard. Pretty cool, huh?

Retrieving the Authenticated User

Masonite ships with a LoadUserMiddleware middleware that will load the user into the request if they are authenticated. Masonite uses the token cookie in order to retrieve the user using the remember_tokencolumn in the table.

Using this LoadUserMiddleware middleware you can retrieve the current user using:

def show(self, request: Request):
    request.user()

If you wish not to use middleware to load the user into the request you can get the request by again using the Auth class

from masonite.auth import Auth

def show(self, request: Request, auth: Auth):
    auth.user()

Checking if the User is Authenticated

If you would like to simply check if the user is authenticated, request.user() or auth.user() will return False if the user is not authenticated. This will look like:

def show(self, request: Request):
    if request.user():
        user_email = request.user().email

Logging In

You can easily log users into your application using the Auth class:

from masonite.auth import Auth

def show(self, request: Request, auth: Auth):
    auth.login(
        request.input('username'),
        request.input('password')
    )

Note that the username you supply needs to be in whatever format the __auth__ attribute is on your model. If the email address is the "username", then the user will need to supply their email address.

If you need more direct control internally, you can login by the models ID:

from masonite.auth import Auth

def show(self):
    auth.login_by_id(1)

You are now logged in as the user with the ID of 1.

If you only want to login "once", maybe for just authenticating an action or verifying the user can supply the correct credentials, you can login without saving any cookies to the browser:

from masonite.auth import Auth

def show(self):
    auth.once().login_by_id(1)

You can do the same for the normal login method as well:

from masonite.auth import Auth

def show(self, request: Request, auth: Auth):
    auth.once().login(
        request.input('username'),
        request.input('password')
    )

Registering a User

You can also easily register a user using the register() method on the Auth class:

from masonite.auth import Auth

def show(self, auth: Auth):
    auth.register({
        'name': 'Joe',
        'email': 'joe@email.com',
        'password': 'secret'
    })

Protecting Routes

Masonite ships with an authentication middleware. You can use this middleware as a route middleware to protect certain routes from non authenticated users. This is great for redirecting users to a login page if they attempt to go to their dashboard.

You can use this middleware in your routes file like so:

Get().route('/dashboard', 'DashboardController@show').middleware('auth')

By default this will redirect to the route named login. If you wish to redirect the user to another route or to a different URI, you can edit the middleware in app/http/middleware/AuthenticationMiddleware.py

Logging Out a User

If you wish to end the session for the user and log them out, you can do so by using the Auth class. This looks like:

auth.logout()

This will delete the cookie that was set when logging in. This will not redirect the user to where they need to go. A complete logout view might look like:

def logout(self, request: Request, auth: Auth):
    auth.logout()
    return request.redirect('/login')

Verifying A User's Email

If you wish to require a user to verify their email address and automatically send them an email, you can extend the User model.

from masonite.auth import MustVerifyEmail

class User(Model, MustVerifyEmail):

    __fillable__ = ['name', 'email', 'password']

    __auth__ = 'name'

When a user registers this will automatically send them an email asking them to confirm their email address.

Redirecting Unverified User's

You can use the VerifyEmailMiddleware class to redirect an unverified user.