How do I check whether this user is anonymous or actually a user on my system?

def index(request):
    the_user = request.user

In Django, how do I know if it's a real user or not? I tried:

if the_user: but "AnonymousUser" is there even if no one logs in. So, it always returns true and this doesn't work.

You can check if request.user.is_anonymous returns True.

An Alternative to

if user.is_anonymous():
    # user is anon user

is by testing to see what the id of the user object is:

if user.id == None:
    # user is anon user
else:
    # user is a real user

see https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/auth/#anonymous-users

You should check the value of request.user.is_authenticated. It will return True for a User instance and False for an AnonymousUser instance.

One answer suggests using is_anonymous but the django.contrib.auth documentation says “you should prefer using is_authenticated to is_anonymous”.

I know I'm doing a bit of grave digging here, but a Google search brought me to this page.

If your view def requires that the user is logged in, you can implement the @login_required decorator:

from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required

@login_required
def my_view(request):
    …

I had a similar issue except this was on a page that the login_redirect_url was sent to. I had to put in the template:

{% if user.is_authenticated %}
    Welcome Back, {{ username }}
{% endif %}

In Django rest framework it's good idea to use permission classes to check if user is authenticated. This will apply to whole viewSet. In the simpliest form it could look like this:

from rest_framework.permissions import IsAuthenticated
...
class SomeViewSet(viewsets.GenericViewSet):
    permission_classes = [IsAuthenticated]