Aadhaar Authentication Service Module

This module builds on python infrastructure for Aadhaar (pyAadhaarAuth authentication library and the django-auth-aadhaar authentication backend) to provide a simple drop in module for adding Aadhaar authentication to any Django website. It should take 5-10 minutes to add aadhaar to your favorite project! Users, once authenticated, can be authenticated and marked aadhaar verified. You can use that aadhaar verified status to provide additional services.

Usage

The module is installed as an app into the django application. The module provides urls and one command. The command installs the configuration files required for aadhaar authentication. Once the settings.py and urls.py are updated, and the configuration files installed, we are good to go.

The URLs provided include:

1. /aadhaar/authenticate/personal - Authentication of PII. You can authenticate address (/aadhaar/authenticate/address) and both together (/aadhaar/authenticate/all)

2. /aadhaar/txn/<txn-id>/ - Show the results of a given authentication request.

3. /aadhaar/history - Shows the history of successful and unsuccessful authentications performed by the user.

Installation

The following instructions are for Ubuntu 11.10 but should work on other versions of Ubuntu.

• Install libraries and their dependencies

  Follow instructions on the repository pages pyAadhaarAuth and django-auth-aadhaar

  The libraries are not yet part of the standard package repositories. Pay particular attention to the M2Crypto package installation instruction.

• Install dependencies (for django_aadhaar)

  $ sudo easy_install django-uni-form 
  $ sudo easy_install python-dateutil==1.5 

• Install django-aadhaar

  $ wget -O django-aadhaar.tgz https://github.com/pingali/django-aadhaar/tarball/master
  $ tar zxvf django-aadhaar.tgz 
  $ cd django-aadhaar
  $ sudo python setup.py install 

Test the installation and make sure that django_aadhaar has installed correctly.

  $ python 
    >>> import django_aadhaar 
    >>> 

The next few steps depend on the application you are trying to add django_aadhaar to. The module comes with an example application - django-aadhaar/example/aadhaartest that already has django_aadhaar installed.

• Install dependencies (for aadhaartest)

  $ sudo easy_install django south netifaces django-recaptcha 

• Add django_aadhaar to the apps list (settings.py)

   INSTALLED_APPS = (
   ...
      'django_aadhaar',
   ) 

• Add authentication paths to valid URLs (urls.py)

   ...
   (r'^aadhaar/', include('django_aadhaar.urls')),
   ...

• Install Aadhaar authentication configuration information

  This aadhaarinit command will add a fixtures directory and within that all the files required for Aadhaar authentication. Please see pyAadhaarAuth for documentation on the configuration and remaining files. When Aadhaar Authentication goes live, you have to update these files.

  $ python manage.py aadhaarinit 

• Specify the authentication configuration file to settings.py

  ...
  AADHAAR_CONFIG_FILE='...fixtures/auth.cfg'
  ...

• Sync the database

  $ python manage.my syncdb 
  $ python manage.my migrate (if using south) 

• Restart the server and visit http://localhost:8000/aadhaar/history

Known Issues

1. dateutil iter() returned non-iterator of type _timelex

   Make sure you install python-dateutil==1.5

2. Templatetag error involving account tags

   Ideally the templatetag path should be updated based on the INSTALLED_APPS to include all module-specific templatetags. But sometimes we have to do it manually. Add the following at the end of the settings.py.

  # => Hack to include the template tags
  for mod in INSTALLED_APPS + ('aadhaartest',):
  try: 
      path = __import__(mod + '.templatetags', {},{}, ['']).__path__
      templatetags.__path__.extend(path)
  except: 
      pass 

Development

1. Feature requests

   Please raise a ticket to let me know what feature you would like to see.

2. Extending/replacing the templates

   First, insert your template path at the beginning of the template search path. Then, create an aadhaar directory, copy the existing template files from django-aadhaar/django_aadhaar/templates/aadhaar and edit them to suit your needs.

Acknowledgements

• TCS and Prof. Harrick Vin for supporting the development
• UIDAI team for technical help and input