Django Better Passwords

This app provides tools to enforce stronger password policies and expiration.

Features

• Configurable password expiration;
• Customizable password validator;
• Uses Django messages framework to warn the user about the expiration;
• Prevents user from logging in after expiration and redirects to password change page;
• Compatible with default Django admin and Django CMS (django-cms) admin;
• Can be used to expire only staff passwords, or for all users;
• Force password update immediately after user creation.

Requirements

Requires Python >= 3.6 and Django >=2. Recommended Python 3.11 or 3.12 and Django 4.2 or 5.0;

Quick start

1. Install the lib with pip install django-better-passwords.
2. Add 'django_better_passwords.apps.BetterPasswordsConfig' to INSTALLED_APPS.
3. Add 'django_better_passwords.middleware.PasswordExpirationMiddleware' to MIDDLEWARE.
   It should be listed after authentication, session and message middlewares, like this:

   MIDDLEWARE = [
      "django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware",
      "django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware",
      "django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware",
      "django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware",
      "django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware",
      "django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware",
      "django_better_passwords.middleware.PasswordExpirationMiddleware",
      "django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware",
   ]

4. Add 'django_better_passwords.validators.custom_password_validator.CustomPasswordValidator' to AUTH_PASSWORD_VALIDATORS.
   Comment out or remove 'django.contrib.auth.password_validation.MinimumLengthValidator' to avoid conflicting:

   AUTH_PASSWORD_VALIDATORS = [
      ...
      # {
      #     "NAME": "django.contrib.auth.password_validation.MinimumLengthValidator",
      # },
      {
         "NAME": "django_better_passwords.validators.custom_password_validator.CustomPasswordValidator",
         "OPTIONS": {
               "min_length": 8,
               "max_length": 20,
               "required_characters": "!#$%^&*()_+{}[]:\"-=,./<>?",
               "required_characters_count": 2,
               "forbidden_characters": "@",
         },
      },
   ]

5. The validator accepts 5 parameters, being:
   1. min_length (int): the minimum password length;
   2. max_length (int): the maximum password length;
   3. required_characters (str): a string containing a list of special characters of which at least required_characters_count must be present in the password;
   4. required_characters_count (int): the number of special required characters that must be present in the password;
   5. forbidden_characters (str): a string containing a list of characters none of which can be present in the password;
6. Aditional app settings:

   DBP_PASSWORD_EXPIRATION_DAYS = 60
   DBP_PASSWORD_CHANGE_REDIRECT_URL = "password_change"
   DBP_LOGOUT_URL = "logout"

   Attention: If DBP_PASSWORD_CHANGE_REDIRECT_URL is present, when a user tries to log in or navigate to any url, he will be redirected to the password_change page.
   If it is not present, only users who try to access the admin area will be redirected.

Contributing

We use pre-commit paired with black, flake8 and isort to keep things in their rightful place.

After cloning the project:

• Create and activate a venv;
• Install pip-tools;
• Run pip-compile requirements.in and pip-sync requirements.txt to install dependencies;
• Run pre-commit install -f to install pre-commit hook. It will create a git hook, that will run automatically before every commit;

Acknowledgements

This app is inspired by django-password-policies-iplweb and django-password-expire.

Author

André Corrêa - [email protected]