Getting custom Django REST user class in React using JSON Web Token

Question

Context:

My project is using Django REST together with React.
I have made a User class that extends AbstractBaseUser, based on this tutorial to get a couple of extra fields, and to use email, instead of a username, to authenticate.
To log in, I'm using the djangorestframework-jwt to get an access token in React.

Problem:

I haven't found a way to get a user instance from Django REST based on the JSON Web Token.

What I have tried:

Tried using the JWTAuthentication with this view:

@api_view(['POST'])
@authentication_classes([JWTAuthentication])
def getUser(request, format=None):
    content = {
        'user': str(request.user),
        'auth': str(request.auth)
    }
    return Response(content)

It does kinda work since it returns the user's email address and token, but I want to get all user fields.

I also tried copying from this SO answer, but in setting.py I don't know how to specify the path to the JWTAuthentication class.

My user class:

from django.contrib.auth.models import PermissionsMixin
from django.contrib.auth.base_user import AbstractBaseUser, BaseUserManager

class UserManager(BaseUserManager):
    use_in_migrations = True

    def _create_user(self, email, password, **extra_fields):
        if not email:
            raise ValueError('The given email must be set')

        email = self.normalize_email(email)
        user = self.model(email=email, **extra_fields)
        user.set_password(password)
        user.save(using=self._db)
        return user

    def create_user(self, email, password, **extra_fields):
        extra_fields.setdefault('is_superuser', False)
        return self._create_user(email, password, **extra_fields)

    def create_superuser(self, email, password, **extra_fields):
        extra_fields.setdefault('is_superuser', True)

        if extra_fields.get('is_superuser') is not True:
            raise ValueError('Superuser must have is_superuser=True.')

        return self._create_user(email, password, **extra_fields)

class User(AbstractBaseUser, PermissionsMixin):
    email = models.EmailField(unique=True)
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    date_joined = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    is_active = models.BooleanField(default=True)
    about = models.CharField(max_length=250)

    objects = UserManager()

    USERNAME_FIELD = 'email'

    REQUIRED_FIELDS = [ 'first_name', 'last_name', 'password' ]

Hope someone can give some pointers. Thanks!

Answer 1

'user': str(request.user) this would fetch the user object and call __str__ method

@api_view(['GET'])
@authentication_classes([JWTAuthentication])
def GetUser(request, format=None):
    user = request.user
    content = {
        'id': user.id,
        'email': user.email,
        'first_name': user.first_name,
        # other_fields
        'auth': str(request.auth)
    }
    return Response(content)