`auth` context processor shouldn't error if `AuthenticationMiddleware` isn't being used

[David S. <dschein@…>]

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS default includes django.core.context_processors.auth. This callable assumes that something (presumably django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware) has added an attribute, 'user', to the request. So django.core.context_processors.auth throws an AttributeError exception.

It seems this should be better documented or maybe just wrap the return in the auth method with a try and return {} if there is an AttributeException. Anyway, most everyone must use auth!

[Chris Beaven]

It seems there are two facets to this ticket:

1. django.core.context_processors.auth should be in contrib
2. context processor auth fails if AuthenticationMiddleware isn't being used

They seem two independent issues, so I'm going to rename the title of this one to issue 2 which seems the more pressing. Thanks for the report David, and feel free to open another ticket just focussing on moving the processor to auth (which would be a hard sell with it breaking backwards compatibility with every default project ever created)

[Collin Grady <cgrady@…>]

Projects created from manage.py startproject do not define TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS though, so they're all using the default value from global_settings.py.

If the processor was moved and the default TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS value adjusted, they'd all work just fine - only those who redefined the value will have to update their settings.

[Grzegorz Ślusarek]

patch against revision 6213

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

(In [6356]) Fixed #4049 -- Improved error handling in auth() context processor. Based on a patch from gregorth.