Summary: DRF, OAuth, and Social Authentication

1. Part 1: this summary
2. Part 2: OAuth2 with Django Rest Framework - Use the OAuth2 scheme to authenticate your own users on your app (i.e., in place of token auth or session auth)
3. Part 3: Social Auth with Django REST Framework - Authenticate your users with third-party services like Facebook, Twitter, and Google
4. Part 4: Server vs. Client OAuth Flows - A little more explanation of how this is working, and why we are writing server code that uses the client-side auth flow
5. Part 5: DRF and Python Social Auth: Tying It All Together - Combine parts 2 & 3 in an app where users authenticate with an OAuth scheme and link social accounts

We have also tackled some of the same problems with Tastypie. See Integrating Django, Tastypie & Python Social Auth to see a Tastypie implementation of Part 3.

My Thoughts

Frankly, after making all this work, I'm not convinced that implementing your own OAuth flow (part 2) is much more secure than using token-based authentication. We initially read some documentation that encouraged us to go down this path, but it's not up anymore, and our own thoughts are that it may be unhelpfully complex. Of course, if you're looking to set your app up as an oauth provider for other applications, this is the way to go. But serving your own client-side app with this auth scheme may not really provide any benefit. That said, you should review the authentication flows in parts 2 & 5 and decide for yourself.

If you're looking to set up something similar to part 5 (in-app oauth + social authentication) and you're not interested in how it all works, you may want to check out the descriptively named django-rest-framework-social-oauth2. I haven't used it, but it promises to do something similar to that set up.

Finally, I wrote most of this code when I had been programming for one year, and using DRF for about two weeks. I can 100% guarantee you it is not perfect, and in our fast-changing industry it may become outdated. Feel free to (politely, constructively) help me learn.