Custom Remote User

Custom Remote User is a Django app that extends remote user authentication enabling custom common behavior. The app currently offers only a case-insensitive backend CaseInsensitiveRemoteUserBackend.

CaseInsensitiveRemoteUserBackend guarantees that all users created using an external authentication service are created with an all-lower case username. This is important because some external authentication services return a case-sensitive username upon login. This is problematic with Django as the built-in user model is case-sensitive. This means a single remote user may have two different records in that database (e.g. 'Username' is different than 'username').

Quick start

1. Add "custom_remote_user" to your INSTALLED_APPS setting like this:

   INSTALLED_APPS = [
       ...
       'custom_remote_user',
   ]
   

2. Add CaseInsensitiveRemoteUserBackend:

   AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = [
       'custom_remote_user.backends.CaseInsensitiveRemoteUserBackend',
   ]
   

3. Add the required middlewares for remote user authentication:

   MIDDLEWARE = [
       ...
       'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
       'django.contrib.auth.middleware.RemoteUserMiddleware',
       ...
   ]