Trying to prevent international users from accessing my Django site

Question

I don't want to have a cookie policy, so for legal issues, I want to block international users from my site - basically redirect them to a "sorry not available to international users page" and prevent them from accessing the main site. How should do I prevent them from accessing the main site? There is no authentication system for the main site currently. This is mostly a design question.

This is how I thought about doing it, but it would be hard. Is there an easier way?

First, I pull their country from their IP (which I already have). Then, I force them into a first level login page, that they need a username and password to login. However, this is painful, since I already have a user authentication system for paying users. Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

You can write a middleware for this. For example:

from django.http import HttpResponseNotFound

class RestrictUserMiddleware(object):
    def __init__(self, get_response):
        self.get_response = get_response

    def __call__(self, request):
        x_forwarded_for = request.META.get('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR')

        if x_forwarded_for:
            ipaddress = x_forwarded_for.split(',')[-1].strip()
        else:
           ipaddress = request.META.get('REMOTE_ADDR')

        country = get_country(ipaddress) # Your implementation of getting country
        if country != 'your country':
            return HttpResponseNotFound("not available in your country")

        response = self.get_response(request)
        return response

And add it in MIDDLEWARE settings:

MIDDLEWARE = [
   # rest of the middlewares 
   'pathTo.RestrictUserMiddleware',
]