Question 1

Is Amazon Cognito SaaS or PAAS?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Cognito is a service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that falls into the category of Platform as a Service (PaaS). Cognito is a service that helps authenticate and authorize mobile and web applications and users. It provides features such as user registration, sign-in, and access control for application resources.

Question 2

Are there alternatives to using Cognito in Django?

Accepted Answer

Yes, there are alternatives to using Amazon Cognito in Django, some of which are:  Django's built-in authentication system: Django provides a built-in authentication system that handles user authentication, registration, and password management. Django Allauth: This is a third-party package for Django that provides additional authentication features such as social media authentication and email verification. Django Rest Framework (DRF) Authentication: DRF provides several authentication classes that can be used to authenticate Django Rest Framework views, such as TokenAuthentication and SessionAuthentication. Django OAuth Toolkit (DOT): This is a third-party package for Django that provides OAuth2 authentication for Django Rest Framework views. Other third-party packages, like Django-Auth-OIDC, python-social-auth, and django-rest-auth, that can be used for user authentication and management in Django. Ultimately the choice of the library will depend on the project requirements and the team's expertise.

Question 3

How to fix that Amazon Cognito in Django treats both usernames and emails as case-sensitive?

Accepted Answer

While the Amazon Cognito User Pools service supports case insensitivity for user aliases, it is a relatively new feature for new User Pools (but existing ones still have such a problem). Previously, one option to fix that was that on the frontend side, the app made emails lowercase. Another idea was to fix that on the Cognito Pool level with the Lambda function on the `PreSignUp` trigger, but it didn’t allow changing the input values. Thus, the only way was to override email/username after a user was created in `PostConfirmation` lambda, which is not much elegant.

Question 4

How to integrate Django and AWS Cognito?

Accepted Answer

Install packages Create a User Pool in AWS Cognito Create a custom user model Configure REMOTE_USER Configure DRF Configure djangorestframework-jwt Create a test view Run the server and make a request

Question 5

Is there a way to auto-login users in Cognito?

Accepted Answer

Cognito does not provide a way to auto-login the user. During the signup flow, users always have to enter their login and password right after clicking on the confirmation link in the email.

Python/Django Development Blog 23

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