An Authentication backend for Django Rest Framework for AWS Cognito JWT tokens

pip install django-cognito-jwt

Add the following lines to your Django settings.py file:

COGNITO_AWS_REGION = '<aws region>' # 'eu-central-1'
COGNITO_USER_POOL = '<user pool>'   # 'eu-central-1_xYzaq'
COGNITO_AUDIENCE = '<client id>'

(Optional) If you want to cache the Cognito public keys between requests you can enable the COGNITO_PUBLIC_KEYS_CACHING_ENABLED setting (it only works if you have the Django CACHES setup to anything other than the dummy backend).

COGNITO_PUBLIC_KEYS_CACHING_ENABLED = True
COGNITO_PUBLIC_KEYS_CACHING_TIMEOUT = 60*60*24  # 24h caching, default is 300s

Also update the rest framework settings to use the correct authentication backend:

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': [
        ...
        'django_cognito_jwt.JSONWebTokenAuthentication',
        ...
    ],
    ...
 }

Be sure you are passing the ID Token JWT from Cognito as the authentication header. Using the Access Token will work for authentication only but we're unable to use the get_or_create_for_cognito method with the Access Token.

(Optional) If you want to use a different user model then the default DJANGO_USER_MODEL you can use the COGNITO_USER_MODEL setting.

COGNITO_USER_MODEL = "myproject.AppUser"