How to access mod_ssl environment variables from django using mod_wsgi?

Question

I'm trying to get the client's certificate and sign an xml file using it. I have added the following to my virtual hosts:

SSLVerifyClient optional
SSLVerifyDepth 1
SSLOptions +stdEnvVars

This should allow mod_ssl to get the user's certificate. But I don't know how to pass it along to my django app. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Those Apache configuration directives mean that mod_ssl environment variables should now be available in the environment inherited by Django. You can therefore access them using the os.environ object in your Django view:

import os
client_cert = os.environ['SSL_CLIENT_CERT']

The SSL_CLIENT_CERT variable contains the PEM-encoded client certificate.