Configuration

Application setup

Once the application is installed (check Installation) define the following settings to enable the application behavior. Also check the sections dedicated to each framework for detailed instructions.

Settings name

Almost all settings are prefixed with SOCIAL_AUTH_, there are some exceptions for Django framework like AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS.

All settings can be defined per-backend by adding the backend name to the setting name like SOCIAL_AUTH_TWITTER_LOGIN_URL. Settings discovery is done by reducing the name starting with backend setting, then app setting and finally global setting, for example:

SOCIAL_AUTH_TWITTER_LOGIN_URL
SOCIAL_AUTH_LOGIN_URL
LOGIN_URL

The backend name is generated from the name attribute from the backend class by uppercasing it and replacing - with _.

Keys and secrets

• Setup needed OAuth keys (see OAuth section for details):

  SOCIAL_AUTH_TWITTER_KEY = 'foobar'
  SOCIAL_AUTH_TWITTER_SECRET = 'bazqux'
  

OpenId backends don’t require keys usually, but some need some API Key to call any API on the provider. Check Backends sections for details.

Authentication backends

Register the backends you plan to use, on Django framework use the usual AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS settings, for others, define SOCIAL_AUTH_AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS:

SOCIAL_AUTH_AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
    'social_core.backends.open_id.OpenIdAuth',
    'social_core.backends.google.GoogleOpenId',
    'social_core.backends.google.GoogleOAuth2',
    'social_core.backends.google.GoogleOAuth',
    'social_core.backends.twitter.TwitterOAuth',
    'social_core.backends.yahoo.YahooOpenId',
    ...
)

URLs options

These URLs are used on different steps of the auth process, some for successful results and others for error situations.

SOCIAL_AUTH_LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL = '/logged-in/'

Used to redirect the user once the auth process ended successfully. The value of ?next=/foo is used if it was present

SOCIAL_AUTH_LOGIN_ERROR_URL = '/login-error/'

URL where the user will be redirected in case of an error

SOCIAL_AUTH_LOGIN_URL = '/login-url/'

Is used as a fallback for LOGIN_ERROR_URL

SOCIAL_AUTH_NEW_USER_REDIRECT_URL = '/new-users-redirect-url/'

Used to redirect new registered users, will be used in place of SOCIAL_AUTH_LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL if defined. Note that ?next=/foo is appended if present, if you want new users to go to next, you’ll need to do it yourself.

SOCIAL_AUTH_NEW_ASSOCIATION_REDIRECT_URL = '/new-association-redirect-url/'

Like SOCIAL_AUTH_NEW_USER_REDIRECT_URL but for new associated accounts (user is already logged in). Used in place of SOCIAL_AUTH_LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL

SOCIAL_AUTH_DISCONNECT_REDIRECT_URL = '/account-disconnected-redirect-url/'

The user will be redirected to this URL when a social account is disconnected

SOCIAL_AUTH_INACTIVE_USER_URL = '/inactive-user/'

Inactive users can be redirected to this URL when trying to authenticate.

Successful URLs will default to SOCIAL_AUTH_LOGIN_URL while error URLs will fallback to SOCIAL_AUTH_LOGIN_ERROR_URL.

User model

UserSocialAuth instances keep a reference to the User model of your project, since this is not known, the User model must be configured by a setting:

SOCIAL_AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'foo.bar.User'

User model must have a username and email field, these are required.

Also an is_authenticated and is_active boolean flags are recommended, these can be methods if necessary (must return True or False). If the model lacks them a True value is assumed.

Tweaking some fields length

Some databases impose limitations on index columns (like MySQL InnoDB). These limitations won’t play nice on some UserSocialAuth fields. To avoid such errors, define some of the following settings.

SOCIAL_AUTH_UID_LENGTH = <int>

Used to define the max length of the field uid. A value of 223 should work when using MySQL InnoDB which impose a 767 bytes limit (assuming UTF-8 encoding).

SOCIAL_AUTH_NONCE_SERVER_URL_LENGTH = <int>

Nonce model has a unique constraint over ('server_url', 'timestamp', 'salt'), salt has a max length of 40, so server_url length must be tweaked using this setting.

SOCIAL_AUTH_ASSOCIATION_SERVER_URL_LENGTH = <int> or SOCIAL_AUTH_ASSOCIATION_HANDLE_LENGTH = <int>

Association model has a unique constraint over ('server_url', 'handle'), both fields lengths can be tweaked by these settings.

Username generation

Some providers return a username, others just an ID or email or first and last names. The application tries to build a meaningful username when possible but defaults to generating one if needed.

A UUID is appended to usernames in case of collisions. Here are some settings to control username generation.

SOCIAL_AUTH_UUID_LENGTH = 16

This controls the length of the UUID appended to usernames.

SOCIAL_AUTH_USERNAME_IS_FULL_EMAIL = True

If you want to use the full email address as the username, define this setting.

SOCIAL_AUTH_SLUGIFY_USERNAMES = False

For those that prefer slugged usernames, the get_username pipeline can apply a slug transformation (code borrowed from Django project) by defining this setting to True. The feature is disabled by default to to not force this option to all projects.

SOCIAL_AUTH_CLEAN_USERNAMES = True

By default a set of regular expressions are applied over usernames to clean them from usual undesired characters like spaces. Set this setting to False to disable this behavior.

Extra arguments on auth processes

Some providers accept particular GET parameters that produce different results during the auth process, usually used to show different dialog types (mobile version, etc).

You can send extra parameters on auth process by defining settings per backend, example to request Facebook to show Mobile authorization page, define:

FACEBOOK_AUTH_EXTRA_ARGUMENTS = {'display': 'touch'}

For other providers, just define settings in the form:

SOCIAL_AUTH_<uppercase backend name>_AUTH_EXTRA_ARGUMENTS = {...}

Also, you can send extra parameters on request token process by defining settings in the same way explained above but with this other suffix:

SOCIAL_AUTH_<uppercase backend name>_REQUEST_TOKEN_EXTRA_ARGUMENTS = {...}

Basic information is requested to the different providers in order to create a coherent user instance (with first and last name, email and full name), this could be too intrusive for some sites that want to ask users the minimum data possible. It’s possible to override the default values requested by defining any of the following settings, for Open Id providers:

SOCIAL_AUTH_<BACKEND_NAME>_IGNORE_DEFAULT_AX_ATTRS = True
SOCIAL_AUTH_<BACKEND_NAME>_AX_SCHEMA_ATTRS = [
    (schema, alias)
]

For OAuth backends:

SOCIAL_AUTH_<BACKEND_NAME>_IGNORE_DEFAULT_SCOPE = True
SOCIAL_AUTH_<BACKEND_NAME>_SCOPE = [
    ...
]

Processing redirects and urlopen

The application issues several redirects and API calls. The following settings allow some tweaks to the behavior of these.

SOCIAL_AUTH_SANITIZE_REDIRECTS = False

The auth process finishes with a redirect, by default it’s done to the value of SOCIAL_AUTH_LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL but can be overridden with next GET argument. If this setting is True, this application will vary the domain of the final URL and only redirect to it if it’s on the same domain.

SOCIAL_AUTH_REDIRECT_IS_HTTPS = False

On projects behind a reverse proxy that uses HTTPS, the redirect URIs can have the wrong schema (http:// instead of https://) if the request lacks the appropriate headers, which might cause errors during the auth process. To force HTTPS in the final URIs set this setting to True

SOCIAL_AUTH_URLOPEN_TIMEOUT = 30

Any urllib2.urlopen call will be performed with the default timeout value, to change it without affecting the global socket timeout define this setting (the value specifies timeout seconds).

urllib2.urlopen uses socket.getdefaulttimeout() value by default, so setting socket.setdefaulttimeout(...) will affect urlopen when this setting is not defined, otherwise this setting takes precedence. Also this might affect other places in Django.

timeout argument was introduced in python 2.6 according to urllib2 documentation

Whitelists

Registration can be limited to a set of users identified by their email address or domain name. To white-list just set any of these settings:

SOCIAL_AUTH_<BACKEND_NAME>_WHITELISTED_DOMAINS = ['foo.com', 'bar.com']

Supply a list of domain names to be white-listed. Any user with an email address on any of the allowed domains will login successfully, otherwise AuthForbidden is raised.

SOCIAL_AUTH_<BACKEND_NAME>_WHITELISTED_EMAILS = ['me@foo.com', 'you@bar.com']

Supply a list of email addresses to be white-listed. Any user with an email address in this list will login successfully, otherwise AuthForbidden is raised.

Miscellaneous settings

SOCIAL_AUTH_PROTECTED_USER_FIELDS = ['email',]

During the pipeline process a dict named details will be populated with the needed values to create the user instance, but it’s also used to update the user instance. Any value in it will be checked as an attribute in the user instance (first by doing hasattr(user, name)). Usually there are attributes that cannot be updated (like username, id, email, etc.), those fields need to be protect. Set any field name that requires protection in this setting, and it won’t be updated.

SOCIAL_AUTH_SESSION_EXPIRATION = False

By default, user session expiration time will be set by your web framework (in Django, for example, it is set with SESSION_COOKIE_AGE). Some providers return the time that the access token will live, which is stored in UserSocialAuth.extra_data under the key expires. Changing this setting to True will override your web framework’s session length setting and set user session lengths to match the expires value from the auth provider.

SOCIAL_AUTH_OPENID_PAPE_MAX_AUTH_AGE = <int value>

Enable OpenID PAPE extension support by defining this setting.

SOCIAL_AUTH_FIELDS_STORED_IN_SESSION = ['foo',]

If you want to store extra parameters from POST or GET in session, like it was made for next parameter, define this setting with the parameter names.

In this case foo field’s value will be stored when user follows this link <a href="{% url socialauth_begin 'github' %}?foo=bar">...</a>.

SOCIAL_AUTH_PASSWORDLESS = False

When this setting is True and social_core.pipeline.mail.send_validation is enabled, it allows the implementation of a passwordless authentication mechanism. Example of this implementation can be found at psa-passwordless.

SOCIAL_AUTH_USER_AGENT = None

Define the User-Agent header value sent to on every request done to the service provider, used when combined with a backend that sets the SEND_USER_AGENT property to True. Default value is the string social-auth-<version>.

Account disconnection

Disconnect is an side-effect operation and should be done by POST method only, some CSRF protection is encouraged (and enforced on Django app). Ensure that any call to /disconnect/<backend>/ or /disconnect/<backend>/<id>/ is done using POST.