Django Login App Returning 403 Forbidden, CSRF Issues

Question

I'm using this tutorial to try out creating a django login application (super simple stuff...)

This is the code I end up with in my template (index.html)

<div id="login-box">
            {{ state }}
            <form class="login-widgets" action="/login/" method="post">
                {% if next %}
                <input class="login-widgets-text" type="hidden" name="next" value="{{ next }}" />
                {% endif %}
                Username :
                <input class="login-widgets-text" type="text" name="username" value="{{ username}}" /><br />
                Password :
                <input type="password" name="password" value="" /><br />
                <input class="login-button" type="submit" value="Log In" />
            </form>
            <!--<div class="login-widgets">
                <p>Username : ___________</p>
                <p>Password : ___________</p>
            </div>-->
      </div>

And this is what the tutorial told me to add to my app views.py page:

def login_user(request):
    state = "Please log in below..."
    username = password = ''
    if request.POST:
        username = request.POST.get('username')
        password = request.POST.get('password')

        user = authenticate(username=username, password=password)
        if user is not None:
            if user.is_active:
                login(request, user)
                state = "You're successfully logged in!"
            else:
                state = "Your account is not active, please contact the site admin."
        else:
            state = "Your username and/or password were incorrect."

    return render_to_response('index.html',{'state':state, 'username': username})

I set up my test database exactly as it was described in the tutorial and on the django docs, but still my login keeps getting this error in the browser:

Forbidden (403)
CSRF verification failed. Request aborted.

I don't understand what it means by CSRF verification - in my settings.py I have set up the MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES with the following:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = ( 'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware', 'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware', 'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware', 'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware', 'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware', # Uncomment the next line for simple clickjacking protection: # 'django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware', )

But I'm not sure how to verify the CSRF and authenticate login. As far as I know, the database super user and the code above looks correct, except I don't know how to add CSRF verification. Thank you so much for your help!

Answer 1

Add {% csrf_token %}inside your form. It will be replaced by a hidden input with a key.

Step by step documentation.

Concept explanation.