Django Rest Framework custom authorization header

authentication.py

"""
[API] uses the DRF TokenAuthentication with one customisation:
Token is read from 'X-Mirror-Authorization' instead of the 'Authorization' header.

Unfortunately, this is not a simple setting in DRF so we need to override the
contents of get_authorization_header and TokenAuthentication.authenticate.

You may refer to:
https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework/blob/master/rest_framework/authentication.py

Note: we could've monkeypatched get_authorization_header, but this solution
is a bit safer (although more verbose).
"""
from django.utils.six import text_type
from rest_framework.authentication import TokenAuthentication
from rest_framework import HTTP_HEADER_ENCODING, exceptions


# should this be in settings.py ?
AUTHORIZATION_HEADER = 'HTTP_X_CUSTOM_AUTHORIZATION'


def get_authorization_header(request):
    """
    Return request's 'X-Mirror-Authorization:' header, as a bytestring.
    Hide some test client ickyness where the header can be unicode.
    """
    auth = request.META.get(AUTHORIZATION_HEADER, b'')
    if isinstance(auth, text_type):
        # Work around django test client oddness
        auth = auth.encode(HTTP_HEADER_ENCODING)
    return auth


class XMirrorTokenAuthentication(TokenAuthentication):
    """DRF TokenAuthentication that uses X-Mirror-Authorization header."""

    def authenticate(self, request):
        """Authenticate request.

        Identical to DRF's implementation except we use a different
        `get_authorization_header` function
        """
        auth = get_authorization_header(request).split()

        if not auth or auth[0].lower() != self.keyword.lower().encode():
            return None

        if len(auth) == 1:
            msg = _('Invalid token header. No credentials provided.')
            raise exceptions.AuthenticationFailed(msg)
        elif len(auth) > 2:
            msg = _('Invalid token header. Token string should not contain spaces.')
            raise exceptions.AuthenticationFailed(msg)

        try:
            token = auth[1].decode()
        except UnicodeError:
            msg = _('Invalid token header. Token string should not contain invalid characters.')
            raise exceptions.AuthenticationFailed(msg)

        return self.authenticate_credentials(token)