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Weekend Workshop

Adding Authentication to your Django app: AllAuth integration and customisation

Authentication systems need to be secure and user-friendly. Building them by hand is a lot of work, and not recommended. AllAuth is the go-to package for handling user authentication and account management. It is very versatile - AllAuth is very customisable and has an impressive list of features (including many social login options). But integrating and customising it is not exactly straight-forward

Details

Django-allauth is franky brilliant. It provides robust, secure, fully-featured and flexible authentication out of the box. There is a good reason that it's the go-to authentication package for Django developers.

But, let me let you in on a secret - this AllAuth workshop isn't really about AllAuth...

Many people hear about AllAuth and all it can do and then, when they try to dig in and integrate it into their application, they struggle and then move on to some other solution. This is partially because AllAuth is built to be highly super configurable - creating an easy-to-follow tutorial that shows each person how to hit their own use case and match their visual design is not so straight-forward.

The best way to get your head around it is to dig in the code, see examples of AllAuth in action, and experiment with different options. For many people this is intimidating. And many simply don't know how to get started.

AllAuth is not unique

The skills needed to integrate AllAuth into an application are not unique to allAuth. Being able to dig through code and docs, and tweak and override things to work how you need them to is necessary when it comes to many advanced Django dev tasks.

Getting good at AllAuth makes you a better Django developer!

This workshop aims to get you to be the kind of person who can handle things like AllAuth integration with ease.

In this hands-on, practical workshop you will integrate and customise AllAuth in a realistic application. In doing so you will learn what it takes to integrate it into any application and you'll get comfortable in peeking under the hood to see how it works.

What we will cover

• Installing and Configuring django-allauth: Step-by-step guidance for setting up django-allauth in your project.
• Navigating the django-allauth code-base: Yes, we'll be reading the source code to understand how it works! This is useful because customisation is not always obvious, digging around in the code can be very helpful
• Customizing Templates: Learn to adapt Django AllAuth's default templates and styling
• Social Authentication: Enable social logins
• Customizing User Models: Extend Django’s User model with custom fields and integrate it with django-allauth.
• Account Management: Explore features like email verification, password resets, and user account settings.
• Authorization and Permissions: Once you know who a user is, the next step is to make sure they can only do what you allow them to do in your application

Learning from the AllAuth code

The best way to learn to get AllAuth to dance is by looking at the AllAuth code. Py peeking under the hood, we'll be able to get an idea of what the package maintainers think is important. You'll see how internationalisation is implemented, how template hierarchies are structured, and much more!

Prerequisite knowledge

This workshop requires a solid grasp of Django's core concepts.

If you are new to Django you can still join in but it's important to realise that there will be a much steeper learning curve.

You can prepare for this workshop by completing Django's official tutorial

About the instructor

Sheena's early career saw her working as a software engineer and technical leader across multiple startups. But it was her passion for education that led her to devote the last 5+ years to reimagining how we teach people to code professionally.

Over the last half decade she had the opportunity to work in the NGO space and build alternative education systems from the ground up. Along the way she have learned a lot about how to teach well, how to build systems that teach well, how to set teachers up for success, and how traditional education systems fall short.

"I've always had a passion for education and had the opportunity to work directly in tech education for the last half decade. The way I think of my work is: I take the science of learning and turn it into the engineering of learning."

Sheena's technical skills are fairly wide ranging, but she has a strong focus on all things Python and web development.

She is also a recognised international speaker, she primarily focuses on spreading tech education best practices around the world.

Want to know more about Sheena? Here are some links:

• Sheena's blog
• LinkedIn
• Mastodon
• X/Twitter