[proposal] Authorization ( permissions ) handling

[madEng84]

In the docs I can see how to handle Authentication but not how to handle Authorization ( permissions ) After I have identified a logged user I want to return 403 if that user hasn't enough permission to do it DRF has a great way to handle it, using BasePermission.has_permission and BasePermission.has_object_permission

Maybe this library could handle permissions with something like this:

from ninja import Schema
from ninja.permissions import BasePermission

class CanSeeFruitsPerm(BasePermission):
    def has_permission(self, request, view):
        return request.user.has_perm("can_see_fruits")

class AppleOut(Schema):
    color: str
    quality: str
    

@api.get("/apples", auth=BasicAuth(), perm=CanSeeFruitsPerm(), response=List[AppleOut])
def list_apples(request):
    return Apple.objects.all()

What do you think about it?

Thank you

[dozer133]

Great proposal! Wouldn't this mean a lot repetition though?

Another idea would be to add an optional parameter to the __init__ of the Ninja authentication base classes, and having Ninja run a has_permission method if a perm is specified. Then we can specify a permission when instantiating it.

For example

# inherit from base class BasicAuth
class UserAuth(BasicAuth):
    def authenticate(self, request, username, password):
        ....
    
    # Ninja runs this for you if a `perm` is specified on init
    def has_permission(self, request, perm):
        return request.user.has_perm(perm)

@api.get("/apples", auth=UserAuth(perm="can_see_fruits"), response=List[AppleOut])
def list_apples(request):
    return Apple.objects.all()

[madEng84]

I'm glad you like this proposal

I think they are different things, one permission could be used for unauthenticated users too, or the same permission could be used for different authentication types

What do you think about?

[marcosmoyano]

I find myself repeating some sort of permission check against the authenticated user. It would be nice if Ninja supported permission checks like the following:

@router.get(
    url_name="resorce-get",
    path="/{user}/resource",
    response=ResourceSchema,
    auth=[auth1(), auth2(), ....].
    permissions=[perm1(), perm2(), ...]  # <- This
)
def get_resource(
    request: HttpRequest,
    user: str,
    **kwargs
):
....

This would hook nicely into Operation._run_checks

If something like this is welcome, I wouldn't mind trying to submit a PR for it.

[chrisbodon]

So what's the best method to approach different levels of permissions for users in Django ninja?

[flaeppe]

To throw out another idea; it would've been nice with an approach similar to Django's user_passes_test. Though it could come with the adjustment of returning a 403 forbidden response if test didn't pass.

In case django ninja could support decorating an operation, it could look like something below (e.g. login_required and user_passes_test would probably have to be reimplemented to not trigger a redirect, like Django's do)

def email_check(user):
    return user.email.endswith('@example.com')


@api.get("/apples", auth=UserAuth(), response=List[AppleOut])
@login_required
@user_passes_test(email_check)
@permission_required("can_see_fruits", raise_exception=True)
def list_apples(request):
    return Apple.objects.all()

[sebastian-philipp]

And yes, I think we have to re-implement a few decorators here.

I thought I could get around this with raise_exception=True and catching Django's PermissionDenied:

from django.contrib.auth.decorators import permission_required
from django.core.exceptions import PermissionDenied
from ninja import Router

api = NinjaAPI(auth=[some_auth()])

@api.exception_handler(PermissionDenied)
def django_permission_denied(
    request: HttpRequest, exc: PermissionDenied
) -> HttpResponse:
    return api.create_response(...)
   
...
    
@router.get("/")  # <- mypy error
@permission_required('app.some_permission', raise_exception=True)  # note: raise_exception=True
def get_something(request: HttpRequest) -> ...:
    ...

But this is not going to work out, as I'm getting this mypy error:

error: Value of type variable "_VIEW" of function cannot be "Callable[[HttpRequest], ...]"  [type-var]

due to

https://github.com/typeddjango/django-stubs/blob/b81b1bf3868eaab9fecebdd56ed817ffcb07fad8/django-stubs/contrib/auth/decorators.pyi#L8

And I actually think django-stubs is right in assuming the response to be of type HttpResponseBase.

[baseplate-admin]

I have made https://github.com/vitalik/django-ninja/discussions/776 as an alternative way to handle permissions :)

that's mostly inspied from django-rest-framework

[jtraub91]

Why can't this be implemented using django builtin permission_required decorator?

from django.contrib.auth.decorators import permission_required

@permission_required("app.view_model")
@api.get("/model")
def model_get(request):
    ...

This apparently doesn't work as of 0.22.2

[sebastian-philipp]

Why can't this be implemented using django builtin permission_required decorator?

cause, permission_required redirects to a login-page, which is not really the best idea for API clients

https://github.com/django/django/blob/f7389c4b07ceeb036436e065898e411b247bca78/django/contrib/auth/decorators.py#L36