I'm creating a mobile app for my agilitycourses website and I'm using django-rest-framework to provide a REST API for use by the client application. In order to provide authentication and registration I'm using django-allauth. Lastly I use django-rest-auth to provide REST resources for authentication and registration.

I implemented and tested django-rest-framework and then added in django-allauth. But when I went to integrate django-rest-auth POSTing to the /rest-auth/registration/ resource was generating a traceback:

Exception Type: TypeError at /rest-auth/registration/
Exception Value: add_message() argument must be an HttpRequest object, not 'Request';.

It turns out django-allauth's allauth.account.adapter.DefaultAccountAdapter uses Django's messaging middleware to give feedback to users when HTML templates are used. When rest-auth invokes the view it is is passing in a Request. I took a look at the rest-auth demo application and saw that it's settings.py file had django.contrib.messages disabled. Which keeps this traceback from happening.

Disabling messaging is a reasonable thing to do if the service is only handling REST data. For now I'd like to use the same service for both HTML and REST traffic. So I needed a way to disable messaging in django-allauth.

I found django-allauth allows configuring/replacing the account adapter so I subclassed DefaultAccountAdapter and stubbed out the add_message method. I put it in my "glue" application (called main) in a file called adapters.py:

class MessageFreeAdapter(DefaultAccountAdapter):
    """
    django-allauth's `allauth.account.adapter.DefaultAccountAdapter` uses Django's messaging middleware to give feedback to users. When using django-rest-auth for registration/login JSON-REST requests a traceback is generated when the `HTTPRequest` is passed into `django.contrib.messages.add_messages` when a `Request` is expected:

    Exception Type: TypeError at /rest-auth/registration/
    Exception Value: add_message() argument must be an HttpRequest object, not 'Request'.

    If messaging cannot be disabled (it is used by other applications) using this subclass
    disables messaging for allauth/django-rest-auth.

    In settings.py add ACCOUNT_ADAPTER = 'main.adapters.MessageFreeAdapter'
    """
    def add_message(self, request, level, message_template,
                    message_context={}, extra_tags=''):
        pass

Then I set the ACCOUNT_ADAPTER variable in settings.py to use this new adapter:

ACCOUNT_ADAPTER = 'main.adapters.MessageFreeAdapter'

So now I can continue to use Django messaging and use django-allauth in the same Django project.

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