Django Shopify Auth

This Django package makes it easy to integrate Shopify authentication into your Django app. It shares some similarities with the shopify_django_app project, but with a couple of key differences:

• It provides a custom Django Authentication scheme based on AbstractBaseUser and RemoteUserBackend, meaning shops will be authenticated as "users" of your Django app. This makes it easier to use common Django patterns and libraries (such as accessing the currently authenticated store as request.user).

• It persists users' Shopify access tokens in the database, rather than in the Session, meaning your app will be able to make API calls on behalf of a user when they're not logged in.

• It supports the authentication flow for new-style "Embedded SDK" Shopify apps.

This project provides one package, shopify_auth. A demonstration Django project using this package is available here.

If you'd like a detailed breakdown of how to set up an app from scratch using this package, I've recorded a a short series of five minute screencasts showing how to get an app using django-shopify-auth up and running in under 15 minutes.

Package Status

The package author (@gavinballard) is currently in "non-active maintenance" mode. I am happy to review and merge pull requests that provide a clear description of the problem they solve and provide a thorough test to avoid any regressions, but as I don't use Django in my day-to-day Shopify development any more (the last version I used with much regularity was Django 1.9) I am not actively working on the code.

If you're using this package on a regular basis and feel you'd be a good fit to take over active development, please contact me.

Requirements

Tests are run against Django v1.8, v1.10, v1.11, and v2.0. This package may work for other Django versions but it's not guaranteed.

As with the original shopify_django_app package, you'll need a Shopify partner account and to have created an app in order to get an API key and secret.

Package Installation and Setup

There are a few moving parts to set up, but hopefully the following instructions will make things straightforward.

We're assuming in this setup that you're using a standard Django project layout (the sort that's created with the django-admin.py startproject command). We're also assuming that our project is called auth_demo and that the primary Django app inside our project is going to be called auth_app.

If you ever get lost or aren't really sure what to do, you can refer to the demo app.

1. Install package

Installation is super easy via pip:

> pip install django-shopify-auth

Once you have the package installed, add shopify_auth to your INSTALLED_APPS.

2. Add custom user model

Because shopify_auth makes use of Django's authentication system, it provides a custom authentication backend (shopify_auth.backends.ShopUserBackend) which allows authentication through Shopify's OAuth flow.

This backend requires that the user model for your app (specified by AUTH_USER_MODEL in your settings.py) inherits from shopify_auth.models.AbstractShopUser. To do this, just add something like this to the models.py for your Django app:

# auth_demo/auth_app/models.py
from shopify_auth.models import AbstractShopUser

class AuthAppShopUser(AbstractShopUser):
    pass

Then make sure that you have the following line or similar in settings.py:

AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'auth_app.AuthAppShopUser'

3. Configure settings

In addition to setting AUTH_USER_MODEL, there are a few more required additions to settings.py:

# Configure Shopify Application settings
SHOPIFY_APP_NAME = 'Your App Name'
SHOPIFY_APP_API_KEY = os.environ.get('SHOPIFY_APP_API_KEY')
SHOPIFY_APP_API_SECRET = os.environ.get('SHOPIFY_APP_API_SECRET')
SHOPIFY_APP_API_SCOPE = ['read_products', 'read_orders']
SHOPIFY_APP_IS_EMBEDDED = True
SHOPIFY_APP_DEV_MODE = False

# Use the Shopify Auth authentication backend as the sole authentication backend.
AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
    'shopify_auth.backends.ShopUserBackend',
    'shopify_auth.backends.SuperShopBackend',
)

# Add the Shopify Auth template context processor to the list of processors.
# Note that this assumes you've defined TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS earlier in your settings.
TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS += (
    'shopify_auth.context_processors.shopify_auth',
)

# Use the Shopify Auth user model.
AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'auth_app.AuthAppShopUser'

# Set the login redirect URL to the "home" page for your app (where to go after logging on).
LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL = '/'

# Set secure proxy header to allow proper detection of secure URLs behind a proxy.
# This ensures that correct 'https' URLs are generated when our Django app is running behind a proxy like nginx, or is
# being tunneled (by ngrok, for example).
SECURE_PROXY_SSL_HEADER = ('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO', 'https')

Note that in the example above, the application API key and API secret are pulled from environment settings, which is a best practice for Django apps that helps avoid the accidental check-in of sensitive information to source files.

Set SHOPIFY_APP_IS_EMBEDDED to True if your app has been configured as an Embedded app (you choose this option at the time of app creation). Setting this will make the app provide a Javascript-based redirect that breaks out of an embedded app's <iframe> during the authentication flow as per the Shopify documentation. If SHOPIFY_APP_IS_EMBEDDED is False, the normal authentication flow for non-Embedded apps will be used.

Setting SHOPIFY_APP_DEV_MODE to True allows you to test your apps locally by skipping the external OAuth phase for your app. As it means you can log into your app as any store, you should obviously never set this to True in production.

Now that all of the settings are configured, you can run migrate to set up the database for your new user model:

> python manage.py migrate

4. Configure URL mappings

Include shopify_auth URLs in your project's urls.py:

Django 2.0

# urls.py
from django.urls import include, path

urlpatterns = [
    path('login/', include('shopify_auth_urls')),

    # ... remaining configuration here ...
]

Earlier versions of Django

# urls.py
from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, url

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'login/', include('shopify_auth.urls')),

    # ... remaining configuration here ...
)

5. Create application views

Now that you've gotten the configuration out of the way, you can start building your application.

All views inside your application should be decorated with @login_required. This decorator will check that a user has authenticated through the Shopify OAuth flow. If they haven't, they'll be redirected to the login screen.

from django.shortcuts import render
from shopify_auth.decorators import login_required

@login_required
def home(request, *args, **kwargs):
    return render(request, "my_app/home.html")

6. Using the Embedded App SDK

If you're using the Embedded App SDK, be aware that the HTML your views return must contained some Javascript in the <head> to properly frame your app within the Shopify Admin.

Generally, all pages you'd like embedded in the Shopify Admin should contain something like this in <head>:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/assets/external/app.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    ShopifyApp.init({
        apiKey: '{{ SHOPIFY_APP_API_KEY }}',
        shopOrigin: 'https://{{ user.myshopify_domain }}'
    });
    ShopifyApp.ready(function() {
        ShopifyApp.Bar.initialize({
            title: '{{ SHOPIFY_APP_NAME }}',
            buttons: {}
        });
    });
</script>

Recent versions of Django's startproject add django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware to the MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES list in settings.py. This prevents pages being loading in an <iframe>, meaning your app pages will not be displayed in the Shopify admin.

To resolve this issue, you should either remove XFrameOptionsMiddleware from your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES, or ensure that all of your app views make use of the @xframe_options_exempt decorator.

7. Making Shopify API calls

To make Shopify API calls on behalf of a user, we can use the user's session property inside a with statement:

def view(request, *args, **kwargs):

    # Get a list of the user's products.
    with request.user.session:
        products = shopify.Product.find()

    # ... remaining view code ...

Behind the scenes, using with request.user.session sets up a temporary Shopify API session using the OAuth token we obtained for that specific user during authentication.

All code wrapped within the with statement is executed in the context of the specified user. You should always wrap calls to the Shopify API using this pattern.

Partner Application Setup

In addition to getting the package up and running in your local Django project, you'll need to configure your application via the Shopify Partner dashboard. The first part of my brief screencast series walks you through the setup of a Shopify Partner application.

An important omission from the screencast series is that Shopify now requires applications to provide a list of authorized "Redirection URLs" from the partner dashboard for enhanced security (this wasn't a required setting at the time of recording the screencasts).

To avoid getting an OAuth error while customers try to install your application, make sure your application's settings include the absolute URL to /login/finalize/ (including the trailing slash) in their whitelisted URLs. For example, if your application resides at https://myapp.example.com, then you should include https://myapp.example.com/login/finalize/ in the "Redirection URL" section of your application settings.

Questions or Problems?

Browse through the code for the demo app: https://github.com/discolabs/auth_demo

Read up on the possible API calls: http://api.shopify.com

Learn how to use the shopify_python_api library: http://wiki.shopify.com/Using_the_shopify_python_api

Ask technical questions on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/shopify

Email me: gavin@gavinballard.com

Release History

Refer to the change log for a full list of changes.