There are several points during the pieces of a Django app’s lifecycle where you’d like to log in a user without going through the standard login views. These are situations when the user has authenticated their identity in some other way, for example:
- User just successfully signed up. There’s no reason to ask them to re-enter the credentials they just set up.
- User just reset their password.
The official documentation isn’t super clear on how to do it, but it turns out its incredibly easy:
from django.contrib.auth import login user.backend = 'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend' login(request, user)
The backend is used by the auth system later on in the process.
This is a stupid gotcha that took me WAAAAY too long to figure out.
If you’re using the Facebook API with the new profile pages and attempting to set the FBML for a box on the wall and info pages it won’t work out of the box. You need to take whichever client library you’re using (PyFacebook, PHP, etc.) and make sure to point it at http://api.new.facebook.com/. Only then will the profile_main parameter get properly parsed. It would be fabulous if Facebook was to make API differences like that explicit by say, oh, I don’t know, revving the protocol version?
In addition, if you’re using PyFacebook (at least up to r157) you should add the type parameter to facebook.profile.getFBML() in the __init__.py file for the library. Here’s the open issue in PyFacebook’s issue tracker.
This is a brief guide to getting up and running against S3 in Python.
You will need the following things:
- AWS Developer account (you can sign up for it on http://aws.amazon.com)
- Make sure you sign up for S3 (select Amazon Simple Storage Service in the sidebar on the left of the AWS page and then click ‘Sign Up For This Web Service’ over on the right)
- Python (I’m assuming you have it set up and working already)
A great library to use for access to AWS is called boto and its homepage is here: http://code.google.com/p/boto. You can download the code directly and then run its setup.py to install it, or if you already have easy_install you can make it do all of the work:
C:boto-1.3a>python setup.py install
or
C:>python easy_install.py boto
Either way, you can verify that boto is properly installed by trying to import it in python:
C:>python Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Apr 18 2007, 08:51:08) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)] on win32 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import boto >>>
Once boto is set up correctly get your AWS identifiers from the “Your Web Services Account” dropdown in the upper right of the AWS pages. You’ll need to use both the Access key and the Secret key when you make the connection.
At the highest level AWS stores data in ‘buckets’. These are unique across the entire service and each account is limited to a max of 100 of them. Within the bucket you create key/data pairs that look like filenames.
The code to do this is super simple. You’ll probably need to replace ‘examplebucket’ with something else:
from boto.s3.connection import S3Connection from boto.s3.key import Key conn = S3Connection('', '') bucket = conn.create_bucket('examplebucket') k = Key(bucket) k.key = 'foo' k.set_contents_from_filename('foo.png')
Doing this will upload the file foo.png to the bucket ‘examplebucket’. That would mean that the file is accessible at: http://s3.amazonaws.com/examplebucket/foo. If you attempt to go to the appropriate URL for that file you’ll get an access denied error back. By default new objects in the bucket aren’t publicly readable. Making the object readable takes advantage of a shortcut built into boto. In the boto.s3.acl module there is a list of ‘ready-to-use’ modes:
CannedACLStrings = ['private', 'public-read', 'public-read-write', 'authenticated-read']
Now we just set the ‘public-read’ ACL on our key and it will become accessible through the URL:
k.set_acl('public-read')
From here, check out the official documentation and tools such as S3Fox that will make your S3 experience much easier.
You should also grab the bota documentation archive and save it locally to use as a reference.