Private pages

Users with publish permission on a page can set it to be private by clicking the ‘Privacy’ control in the top right corner of the page explorer or editing interface. This sets a restriction on who is allowed to view the page and its sub-pages. Several different kinds of restrictions are available:

  • Accessible to any logged-in users: The user must log in to view the page. All user accounts are granted access, regardless of permission level.

  • Accessible with a shared password: The user must enter the given shared password to view the page. This is appropriate for situations where you want to share a page with a trusted group of people, but giving them individual user accounts would be overkill. The same password is shared between all users, and this works independently of any user accounts that exist on the site.

  • Accessible to users in specific groups: The user must be logged in, and a member of one or more of the specified groups, in order to view the page.

Warning

Shared passwords should not be used to protect sensitive content, as the password is shared between all users, and stored in plain text in the database. Where possible, it’s recommended to require users log in to access private page content.

You can disable shared password for pages using WAGTAIL_ALLOW_SHARED_PASSWORD_PAGE.

WAGTAIL_ALLOW_SHARED_PASSWORD_PAGE = False

Any existing shared password usage will remain active but will not be viewable by the user within the admin, these can be removed in the Django shell as follows.

from wagtail.models import Page

for page in Page.objects.private():
   page.get_view_restrictions().filter(restriction_type='password').delete()

Private collections (restricting documents)

Similarly, documents can be made private by placing them in a collection with appropriate privacy settings (see: Image / document permissions).

You can also disable shared password for collections (which will impact document links) using WAGTAIL_ALLOW_SHARED_PASSWORD_COLLECTION.

WAGTAIL_ALLOW_SHARED_PASSWORD_COLLECTION = False

Any existing shared password usage will remain active but will not be viewable within the admin, these can be removed in the Django shell as follows.

from wagtail.models import Collection

for collection in Collection.objects.all():
    collection.get_view_restrictions().filter(restriction_type='password').delete()

Setting up a login page

Private pages and collections (restricting documents) work on Wagtail out of the box - the site implementer does not need to do anything to set them up.

However, the default “login” and “password required” forms are only bare-bones HTML pages, and site implementers may wish to replace them with a page customized to their site design.

The basic login page can be customized by setting WAGTAIL_FRONTEND_LOGIN_TEMPLATE to the path of a template you wish to use:

WAGTAIL_FRONTEND_LOGIN_TEMPLATE = 'myapp/login.html'

Wagtail uses Django’s standard django.contrib.auth.views.LoginView view here, and so the context variables available on the template are as detailed in Django’s login view documentation.

If the stock Django login view is not suitable - for example, you wish to use an external authentication system, or you are integrating Wagtail into an existing Django site that already has a working login view - you can specify the URL of the login view via the WAGTAIL_FRONTEND_LOGIN_URL setting:

WAGTAIL_FRONTEND_LOGIN_URL = '/accounts/login/'

To integrate Wagtail into a Django site with an existing login mechanism, setting WAGTAIL_FRONTEND_LOGIN_URL = LOGIN_URL will usually be sufficient.

Setting up a global “password required” page

By setting PASSWORD_REQUIRED_TEMPLATE in your Django settings file, you can specify the path of a template which will be used for all “password required” forms on the site (except for page types that specifically override it - see below):

PASSWORD_REQUIRED_TEMPLATE = 'myapp/password_required.html'

This template will receive the same set of context variables that the blocked page would pass to its own template via get_context() - including page to refer to the page object itself - plus the following additional variables (which override any of the page’s own context variables of the same name):

  • form - A Django form object for the password prompt; this will contain a field named password as its only visible field. Several hidden fields may also be present, so the page must loop over form.hidden_fields if not using one of Django’s rendering helpers such as form.as_p.

  • action_url - The URL that the password form should be submitted to, as a POST request.

A basic template suitable for use as PASSWORD_REQUIRED_TEMPLATE might look like this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Password required</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Password required</h1>
        <p>
            You need a password to access this page.
            {% if user.is_authenticated %}To proceed, please log in with an account that has access.{% endif %}
        </p>
        <form action="{{ action_url }}" method="POST">
            {% csrf_token %}

            {{ form.non_field_errors }}

            <div>
                {{ form.password.errors }}
                {{ form.password.label_tag }}
                {{ form.password }}
            </div>

            {% for field in form.hidden_fields %}
                {{ field }}
            {% endfor %}
            <input type="submit" value="Continue" />
        </form>
    </body>
</html>

Password restrictions on documents use a separate template, specified through the setting DOCUMENT_PASSWORD_REQUIRED_TEMPLATE; this template also receives the context variables form and action_url as described above.

Setting a “password required” page for a specific page type

The attribute password_required_template can be defined on a page model to use a custom template for the “password required” view, for that page type only. For example, if a site had a page type for displaying embedded videos along with a description, it might choose to use a custom “password required” template that displays the video description as usual but shows the password form in place of the video embed.

class VideoPage(Page):
    ...

    password_required_template = 'video/password_required.html'