Question

In django-social-auth, there are a few instances where a back-end will raise a ValueError (such as when a user cancels a login request or if a user tries to associate with an account that’s already been associated with another User). If a User runs into one of these scenarios, they’ll be presented with a 500 error on your site.

So, what’s the best way to catch these? I’d prefer to be able to display a useful message (via the messages framework) when this happens, but I’m at a loss as to the best way to do this.

I’m thinking about writing my own view (in a separate app) that just wraps social_auth‘s associate_complete view, but this seems clunky… Any ideas?

I could fork django-social-auth and customize this behavior, but I’d prefer not to maintain a separate fork – especially since I can’t assume everone would want to handle these Exceptions in the same manner.

Answer 1

I’ve ecountered the same problem and it seems, that creating wrapper view is the best way to handle this situation, at this point, atleast. Here is how I had mine done:

def social_auth_login(request, backend):
    """
        This view is a wrapper to social_auths auth
        It is required, because social_auth just throws ValueError and gets user to 500 error
        after every unexpected action. This view handles exceptions in human friendly way.
        See https://convore.com/django-social-auth/best-way-to-handle-exceptions/
    """
    from social_auth.views import auth

    try:
        # if everything is ok, then original view gets returned, no problem
        return auth(request, backend)
    except ValueError, error:
        # in case of errors, let's show a special page that will explain what happened
        return render_to_response('users/login_error.html',
                                  locals(),
                                  context_instance=RequestContext(request))

You will have to setup url for it:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    # ...
    url(r'^social_auth_login/([a-z]+)$',  social_auth_login, name='users-social-auth-login'), 
)

And then use it as before in template:

<a href="{% url 'users-social-auth-login' "google" %}">Log in with Google</a>

Hope this helps, even aftern two months after question was asked 🙂