=============================
Using MongoEngine with Django
=============================

Connecting
==========
In your **settings.py** file, ignore the standard database settings (unless you
also plan to use the ORM in your project), and instead call 
:func:`~mongoengine.connect` somewhere in the settings module.

Authentication
==============
MongoEngine includes a Django authentication backend, which uses MongoDB. The
:class:`~mongoengine.django.auth.User` model is a MongoEngine 
:class:`~mongoengine.Document`, but implements most of the methods and 
attributes that the standard Django :class:`User` model does - so the two are
moderately compatible. Using this backend will allow you to store users in 
MongoDB but still use many of the Django authentication infrastucture (such as
the :func:`login_required` decorator and the :func:`authenticate` function). To
enable the MongoEngine auth backend, add the following to you **settings.py**
file::
    
    AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
        'mongoengine.django.auth.MongoEngineBackend',
    )

The :mod:`~mongoengine.django.auth` module also contains a 
:func:`~mongoengine.django.auth.get_user` helper function, that takes a user's
:attr:`id` and returns a :class:`~mongoengine.django.auth.User` object.

.. versionadded:: 0.1.3

Sessions
========
Django allows the use of different backend stores for its sessions. MongoEngine
provides a MongoDB-based session backend for Django, which allows you to use
sessions in you Django application with just MongoDB. To enable the MongoEngine
session backend, ensure that your settings module has
``'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware'`` in the
``MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES`` field  and ``'django.contrib.sessions'`` in your
``INSTALLED_APPS``. From there, all you need to do is add the following line
into you settings module::

    SESSION_ENGINE = 'mongoengine.django.sessions'

.. versionadded:: 0.2.1