Django REST Framework viewset per-action permissions

Question

Is there a best practice to assign a different permission to each action of a given APIView or ViewSet?

Let's suppose I defined some permissions classes such as 'IsAdmin', 'IsRole1', 'IsRole2', ..., and I want to grant different permissions to the single actions (e.g. a user with Role1 can create or retrieve, a user with Role2 can update, and only an Admin can delete).

How can I structure a class based view in order to assign a permission class to the 'create', 'list', 'retrieve', 'update', 'delete' actions? I'm trying to do so to have a class that can be reused for different tables that have the same permission pattern.

Maybe I'm just drowning in an inch of water, thank you for your replies.

Answer 1

In DRF documentation,

Note: The instance-level has_object_permission method will only be called if the view-level has_permission checks have already passed

Let's assume following permission about user object

• List : staff only
• Create : anyone
• Retrieve : own self or staff
• Update, Partial update : own self or staff
• Destroy : staff only

---

permissons.py

from rest_framework import permissions

class UserPermission(permissions.BasePermission):

    def has_permission(self, request, view):
        if view.action == 'list':
            return request.user.is_authenticated() and request.user.is_admin
        elif view.action == 'create':
            return True
        elif view.action in ['retrieve', 'update', 'partial_update', 'destroy']:
            return True
        else:
            return False

    def has_object_permission(self, request, view, obj):
        # Deny actions on objects if the user is not authenticated
        if not request.user.is_authenticated():
            return False

        if view.action == 'retrieve':
            return obj == request.user or request.user.is_admin
        elif view.action in ['update', 'partial_update']:
            return obj == request.user or request.user.is_admin
        elif view.action == 'destroy':
            return request.user.is_admin
        else:
            return False

views.py

from .models import User
from .permissions import UserPermission
from .serializers import UserSerializer
from rest_framework import viewsets


class UserViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = User.objects.all()
    serializer_class = UserSerializer
    permission_classes = (UserPermission,)

EDIT

For Django 2.0 replace is_authenticated() with is_authenticated. The method has been turned into an attribute.