authentication

I have a simple video website for my kids and each kid has a separate login. This is so they can each have their own videos, but also so that some videos can be private (ie. hidden from the outside world, or other logged in users). Typing in a username and password is impossible for my kids to do, as they are almost 5 and 2 years old, and they use this website on Google TV. So, with a magic token-style login, all they need to do is navigate to their bookmark on the Google TV homepage and press OK on the remote control.

(I don't need crazy security--it wouldn't be the end of the world if somehow someone guessed the magic token and saw some private videos, which are basically just home videos uploaded to Youtube. Videos that I really wouldn't want the public to see don't get uploaded to Youtube in the first place.)

I couldn't find how to do this easily, although one person on stackoverflow suggested "logging in the user in the view by calling 'login'". The tricky part was figuring out that I had to set the User object's backend to 'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend'. It's a bit of a hack, but it works, and it's simple.

models.py:

class MagicToken(models.Model):
    user = models.OneToOneField(User)
    magictoken = models.CharField(max_length=128, unique=True)
 
    def __unicode__(self):
        return unicode(self.user)

views.py:

from django.http import HttpResponse, HttpResponseRedirect, Http404
import django.contrib.auth.login
 
class MagicTokenLogin(View):
    def get(self, request, token):
        try:
            magic_token_obj = MagicToken.objects.get(magictoken=token)
        except MagicToken.DoesNotExist:
            raise Http404
 
        user = magic_token_obj.user
        user.backend = 'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend'
        django.contrib.auth.login(request, user)
        if request.user.is_authenticated():
            # login successful
            return HttpResponseRedirect(reverse('some-view-for-logged-in-users'))
        else:
            # login failed
            return HttpResponseRedirect(reverse('some-view'))