Unable log in to the django admin page with a valid username and password

Question

I can’t log in to the django admin page. When I enter a valid username and password, it just brings up the login page again, with no error messages

This question is in the django FAQ, but I've gone over the answers there and still can't get past the initial login screen.

I'm using django 1.4 on ubuntu 12.04 with apache2 and modwsgi.

I've confirmed that I'm registering the admin in the admin.py file, made sure to syncdb after adding INSTALLED_APPS. When I enter the wrong password I DO get an error, so my admin user is being authenticated, just not proceeding to the admin page.

I've tried both setting SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN to the machine's IP and None. (Confirmed that the cookie domain shows as the machine's IP in chrome)

Also, checked that the user authenticates via the shell:

>>> from django.contrib.auth import authenticate
>>> u = authenticate(username="user", password="pass")
>>> u.is_staff
True
>>> u.is_superuser
True
>>> u.is_active 
True

Attempted login using IE8 and chrome canary, both results in the same return to the login screen.

Is there something else I'm missing????

settings.py

...
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    'django.middleware.gzip.GZipMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.transaction.TransactionMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
)
AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = ('django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',)
INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.admin',    
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'django.contrib.gis',
    'myapp.main',
)

SESSION_EXPIRE_AT_BROWSER_CLOSE = True
SESSION_SAVE_EVERY_REQUEST = True
SESSION_COOKIE_AGE = 86400 # sec
SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN = None
SESSION_COOKIE_NAME = 'DSESSIONID'
SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = False

urls.py

from django.conf.urls.defaults import * #@UnusedWildImport
from django.contrib.staticfiles.urls import staticfiles_urlpatterns
from django.contrib import admin

admin.autodiscover()

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^bin/', include('myproject.main.urls')),    
    (r'^layer/r(?P\d+)/$', "myproject.layer.views.get_result_layer"),
    (r'^layer/b(?P\d+)/$', "myproject.layer.views.get_baseline_layer"),
    (r'^layer/c(?P\d+)/$', "myproject.layer.views.get_candidate_layer"),    
    (r'^layers/$', "myproject.layer.views.get_layer_definitions"),
    (r'^js/mapui.js$', "myproject.layer.views.view_mapjs"),
    (r'^tilestache/config/$', "myproject.layer.views.get_tilestache_cfg"),
    (r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),  
    (r'^sites/', include("myproject.sites.urls")),  
    (r'^$', "myproject.layer.views.view_map"),
)


urlpatterns += staticfiles_urlpatterns()

Apache Version:

Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu) mod_wsgi/3.3 Python/2.7.3 configured

Apache apache2/sites-available/default:


        ServerAdmin ironman@localhost
        DocumentRoot /var/www/bin
        LogLevel warn
        WSGIDaemonProcess lbs processes=2 maximum-requests=500 threads=1
        WSGIProcessGroup lbs
        WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/bin/apache/django.wsgi
        Alias /static /var/www/lbs/static/


        ServerAdmin ironman@localhost
        DocumentRoot /var/www/bin
        LogLevel warn
        WSGIDaemonProcess tilestache processes=2 maximum-requests=500 threads=1
        WSGIProcessGroup tilestache
        WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/bin/tileserver/tilestache.wsgi

UPDATE

The admin page does proceed when using the development server via runserver so it seems like a wsgi/apache issue. Still haven't figured it out yet.

SOLUTION

The problem was that I had the settings file SESSION_ENGINE value set to 'django.contrib.sessions.backends.cache' without having the CACHE_BACKEND properly configured.

I've changed the SESSION_ENGINE to 'django.contrib.sessions.backends.db' which resolved the issue.

user_6169225 · Answer

I had this problem. The issue is that in production I set two variables to True that allowed me to connect to the site using https.

SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE and CSRF_COOKIE_SECURE should be set to False if you are developing on localhost http. Changing these two variables to False allowed me to sign into the admin site when developing locally.

user_7907604 · Answer

After not being able to log in myself, I saw in the comment above someone mentioned about removing non-standard settings.

Adding this to my local settings solved it for me

SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = False

user_9335480 · Answer

Make sure your database user table having following entry is true:

is_staff  => True  (if exit).
is_active  => True .
is_superuser => True.

user_10538100 · Answer

This is not OP's issue, but I am posting this answer in the hopes someone may have gone down the same path as I and arrived at this question as a result.

I came back to an old codebase after a year and was denied access to the admin panel despite all of the usual checks passing (user is present, nothing looks incorrect in the database, all debug modes are on, etc). Unfortunately, I had forgotten that the admin sign in page was not at the usual /admin route, but rather at an alternate route. The /admin page was a fake sign in page that always resulted in a failed sign in.

This setup was created using the app django-admin-honeypot.

user_1495729 · Answer

I had a related issue where I'd try to log in and the page would hang before the socket would eventually be killed. It turned out that I was indeed being logged in, but one of the login signal processors was freezing.

Celery couldn't pass its asynchronous tasks to RabbitMQ because the RabbitMQ server wasn't able to start.

user_10597330 · Answer

What I did was to navigate manually to the url I wanted to visit. So like: http://wildlifeapi.herokuapp.com/admin/ was returning the awful Heroku application error.

So what I did was to visit http://wildlifeapi.herokuapp.com/admin/api/animal/ and BINGO! it worked.

The funny thing is that it works well on my phone. It's probably a django redirection bug.

user_10900548 · Answer

My issue was that My Admin Page was not loading and not working. Here is what I did:

pip uninstall django
pip install django==2.2

For more Detail Check Django Documentation.

user_463463 · Answer

For anyone who encountered this problem after upgrading Django, the problem could be that the signature of the authenticate function has changed at some point. If the signature doesn't match what's expected, the backend is just ignored. So make sure your custom authentication backend authenticate method looks like this:

class EmailUsernameAuthenticationBackend(ModelBackend):
    def authenticate(self, request, username=None, password=None, **kwargs):
       # ...

And NOT like this (without the request argument):

class EmailUsernameAuthenticationBackend(ModelBackend):
    def authenticate(self, username=None, password=None, **kwargs):

user_14508690 · Answer

A bit late for the party, but to me it was different and surprinsingly simpler: for whatever reason my superuser account was gone so, obviously, the solution was I had to create it again.
I'm 99% sure I had executed migrate and makemigrations a few times after having created my superuser, but go figure...

It took me about a whole hour to finally figure it out, however. None of the variables discussed here existed in my settings.py -and still don't to the present moment- (probably because it has been nearly 10 years, so things might have changed considerably), like SESSION_ENGINE, SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN, CACHE_BACKEND, django_session table...
Also, Django's FAQ on this subject mentions checking if my account is_active and is_staff, but unfortunately without ever mentioning how to do it.

user_12484349 · Answer

Use some other virtual environment.it worked for me when i used conda environment.

Unable log in to the django admin page with a valid username and password

23 Answers