Zero Footprint Python-Social-Auth authentication

Question

My site has regular users that use the django default User model, but for one particular functionality, I want people to be able to login using their social accounts (twitter, fb..etc) using python-social-auth without having these logins saved in the database with the user model (no accounts created, no ability to do certain normal user tasks) and with a session timeout.

I looked around for ways to do that but my little research bore no fruit. Any ideas?

Summary:

1. Separation between normal users and social (so I can limit what social auth'd users can do)
2. Session timeout for social auth'd users
3. No addition in the User table for social auth'd users (no footprint).
4. Optional: Obtain their social username and id for logging purposes.

Thanks

Answer 1

I would try to approach this problem by using django.contrib.auth.models.Group and django.contrib.auth.models.Permission. Create one general group with custom permissions to your apps' functionality and add all your normal users to that.

Save accounts created by python-social-auth in default django.contrib.auth.models.User but create seperate Group without any permissions for them.

If necessary create some scheduled task ( either with cronjob or Celery ) which will go through users and deactivate/delete those who expired.

Answer 2

You can differentiate the social user by adding a custom user model for python-social-auth by adding the setting SOCIAL_AUTH_USER_MODEL. Check the setting docs at http://psa.matiasaguirre.net/docs/configuration/settings.html#user-model