Custom Database-Backed Token Auth vs. JWT: Why We Rolled Our Own Authentication in Django Rest Framework (DRF) In modern web development, JSON Web Tokens (JWT) have become the default choice for API authentication. They are stateless, scale horizontally out-of-the-box, and don't require database queries for verification. But are they always the right choice? In this post, we’ll explore how we implemented a custom database-backed token authentication system in Django Rest Framework (DRF), and why this approach is often superior to JWT for real-world applications that require strict control over user sessions, device tracking, and instant token revocation. 1. The Anatomy of Our Custom Token Authentication Instead of using stateless JWTs, our system uses a database-backed Token model paired with a custom authentication backend that hooks directly into Django Rest Framework.…