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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T21:22:25+00:00

I’m working on an intranet django project (not using GAE) for a company that

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I’m working on an intranet django project (not using GAE) for a company that uses Google Apps for login. So I’d like my users to be able to log in to my django project using their google accounts login. OpenID seems appropriate, although maybe Oauth might work too?

I see a lot of similarly named libraries out there to connect django’s auth system to external login systems:

Here’s what I’d like to do with the integration: Have users login with their google accounts, instead of the native django system. Keep django’s permissions model for things like the admin system. So I think that means automatically creating a new user record in django the first time a new account we haven’t seen before logs in.

Can anyone with experience using any of these projects advise me on which would work best? Or just advice on which are most active / functional if you’ve tried them? Thanks!

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  1. Editorial Team

    I finally got this working, so I’ll answer my own question since the previous answers here were helpful but don’t tell the whole story.

    django-openid-auth is actually quite easy to set up and use. The README file is very clear. If you just want to use standard google accounts (i.e. @gmail.com addresses) then you configure it in settings.py with:

    OPENID_SSO_SERVER_URL = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id'

    But if you want to use a “google apps” account, i.e. hosted gmail at your own company’s domain, then it’s more complicated. I got my details from this question. To use your google apps accounts, configure your settings.py to:

    OPENID_SSO_SERVER_URL = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/site-xrds?hd=example.com'
# replace example.com with your hosted google apps domain

    In the future this might just work, but today it probably won’t. The problem is in python-openid which django-openid-auth relies on. The standard build of python-openid doesn’t understand some protocol extensions google is using. (Why does google need to extend the protocol? Dig through http://groups.google.com/group/google-federated-login-api/web/openid-discovery-for-hosted-domains and report back. Good luck.) So you need to instead use adieu’s patch to python-openid, which is available here:
    http://github.com/adieu/python-openid

    Install this over your existing python-openid. Now it should work.

    Be careful with the OPENID_USE_AS_ADMIN_LOGIN setting since it requires you to have an openid user account which is ‘staff’ or ‘superuser’ to use admin which won’t happen by default. So you’ll need to do a 2-step process of enabling openid, logging in with your openid to create an account in django, then using your old admin account to mark your own openid account as superuser, and then disabling non-openid admin access.

    One more thing: your domain admin might need to enable openid login for your domain before this will work. The control is at http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/example.com/SetupIdp

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