Django differentiate between incorrect login information and inactive user on login

Currently I added in my site a method for email confirmation when registering. What I saw though, is that when the user is registered, but didn’t click in the confirmation link yet and tries to login, I can’t differentiate between wrong user/password and not confirmed user.

This is my login function:

def loginUser(request):
    if request.user.is_authenticated:
        return redirect("decks:index")
    if request.method == "POST":
        form = AuthenticationForm(request, data=request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            username = form.cleaned_data.get('username')
            password = form.cleaned_data.get('password')
            user = authenticate(username=username, password=password)
            if user is not None and user.is_active:
                login(request, user)
                return redirect("myApp:portal")
            elif user is not None:
                messages.error(request, "Email is not confirmed.")
            else:
                messages.error(request, "Invalid username or password.")
        else:
            messages.error(request, "Invalid username or password.")
    form = AuthenticationForm()
    return render(request, "myApp/login.html", context = {'login_form': form})

The problem is that when running form.is_valid() the authenticate function from /home/nowork/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/django/contrib/auth ModelBackend is executed:

def authenticate(self, request, username=None, password=None, **kwargs):
    if username is None:
        username = kwargs.get(UserModel.USERNAME_FIELD)
    if username is None or password is None:
        return
    try:
        user = UserModel._default_manager.get_by_natural_key(username)
    except UserModel.DoesNotExist:
        # Run the default password hasher once to reduce the timing
        # difference between an existing and a nonexistent user (#20760).
        UserModel().set_password(password)
    else:
        if user.check_password(password) and self.user_can_authenticate(user):
            return user

So the form.is_valid() will never be true when the is_active flag is False. So I have no way of telling if the combination of user+password is incorrect or the user is not confirmed yet.

I’m not sure what’s the correct way of doing this, I thought to do something like:

User.objects.get(username=request.POST['username'])

Can users exploit this somehow? Is there any better way to accomplish this?

Using python3 and Django 4.0

Answer

You can make your own CustomLoginBackend as

from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model

class CustomLoginBackend(object):

    def authenticate(self, request, username, password):
        User = get_user_model()
        try:
            user = User.objects.using(db_name).get(username=username)
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return None
        else:
            if user.check_password(password):
                return user
        return None

Then in your views.py

def loginUser(request):
    if request.user.is_authenticated:
        return redirect("decks:index")
    if request.method == "POST":
        form = AuthenticationForm(request, data=request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            username = form.cleaned_data.get('username')
            password = form.cleaned_data.get('password')
            user = authenticate(username=username, password=password)
            if user is not None:
                if user.is_active == True:
                    login(request, user)
                    return redirect("myApp:portal")
                else:
                    messages.error(request, "Email is not confirmed.")
            else:
                messages.error(request, "Invalid username or password.")
        else:
            messages.error(request, "Invalid username or password.")
    form = AuthenticationForm()
    return render(request, "myApp/login.html", context = {'login_form': form})

And at last don’t forgot to add AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS in your settings.py as

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = ['path_to_your.CustomLoginBackend ',]