Django and Middleware which uses request.user is always Anonymous

I’ve solved this problem by getting DRF token from the requests and loading request.user to the user associated to that model.

I had the default django authentication and session middleware, but it seems DRF was using it’s token auth after middleware to resolve the user (All requests were CORS requests, this might have been why). Here’s my updated middleware class:

from re import sub
from rest_framework.authtoken.models import Token
from core.models import OrganizationRole, Organization, User

class OrganizationMiddleware(object):

  def process_view(self, request, view_func, view_args, view_kwargs):
    header_token = request.META.get('HTTP_AUTHORIZATION', None)
    if header_token is not None:
      try:
       token = sub('Token ', '', header_token)
        token_obj = Token.objects.get(key = token)
        request.user = token_obj.user
      except Token.DoesNotExist:
        pass
    #This is now the correct user
    print (request.user)

This can be used on process_view or process_request as well.

Hopefully this can help someone out in the future.