how to add authentication to a wsgiref python web service

Question

I am working on a sample code given in the python documentation, the code is:

from wsgiref.simple_server import make_server, demo_app

httpd = make_server('', 8000, demo_app)
print "Serving HTTP on port 8000..."

# Respond to requests until process is killed
httpd.serve_forever()

# Alternative: serve one request, then exit
httpd.handle_request()

I can access this through the localhost on port 8000, but now if I want to pass username/password with the "localhost:8000 username, password" how do I do this. I have figured out how I would get to know if the authentication was unsuccessful but not how to actually receive the username/password for checking..

Any hints, and tips.....

Cheers,

Answer 1

If you pass username/password in the query string like http://localhost:8000?username=x&password=y, you can retrieve them in your WSGI handler function from the environ dict: environ['QUERY_STRING']. You can use urlparse.parse_qs from the standard library to parse it. If this is code that's going into production, I second Joran, you should use at least HTTP Basic Authentication and some authentication middleware like barrel.