Back when I expressed interest in making the web presentation bounty based solely on client-side code, Simon (bounty master and Filer admin) expressed his wish to keep the two services decoupled (so I shouldn't rely on Filer for slideshow storage). While I still want to have a save-to-Filer feature, I decided that I should just go ahead and get the web presentation system up and running before worrying about a client-side-only version. So I started a Django project.

Anyway, the result is that I got CAS 1.0 working alongside the Django authentication system, which means I can take advantage of built-in features like permissions and messages with CAS-authenticated users.

If anyone else is interested in using CAS authentication with Django, you can download the code I'm using. Here's a brief usage guide:

  • Set SERVICE_URL in cas/__init__.py to the location of your CAS service. For example, Case's is https://login.case.edu/cas/.
  • Set DEFAULT_REDIRECT_URL in cas/__init__.py. Normally the user will be sent back to their HTTP_REFERER (the page that requested login) after authentication. But if the user requests /accounts/login/ directly (or there is no HTTP_REFERER), they will be sent to DEFAULT_REDIRECT_URL.
  • Enable the login and logout views by adding these to your URLconf (customize the URLs if you want): 
    (r'^accounts/login/$', 'your_site.cas.views.login'),
(r'^accounts/logout/$', 'your_site.cas.views.logout'),
  • Add the backend in settings.py: 
    AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
    'your_site.cas.backends.CASBackend',
)
  • Make sure at least the following apps are installed: 
    INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'your_site.cas',
)
  • Finally, if you have a way to populate the user's name and e-mail address fields from their username, put it in cas/backends.py (see the comments). For example, I have LDAP code there.

P.S.: This just implements the minimum required for CAS authentication. Features like gateway, renew, and proxies are not supported.

An alpha version of the presentation system should be online to play with later this week.