When building web applications, sometimes you need to restrict access to specific users or networks for security reasons. For example, you might want only internal team members (with fixed IPs) to access the Django admin panel or a private API.
One effective way to achieve this is by creating a custom middleware that whitelists allowed IP addresses and blocks all others.
🚀 What is IP Whitelisting?
IP Whitelisting is a security measure that grants access to a system only from a predefined set of IP addresses. Anyone trying to access your application from an IP not in the list will be denied.
This is commonly used to:
Restrict access to admin dashboards.
Protect internal APIs.
Add an extra layer of security beyond authentication.
🛠️ Creating IP Whitelisting Middleware in Django
Let’s build a custom middleware class that allows requests only from specific IP addresses.
Step 1: Create the Middleware
Create a file middleware.py inside your Django app (e.g., core/middleware.py) and add the following code: