I'm building an app with a Django backend, Angular frontend, and a REST API using Django REST Framework for Angular to consume. When I was still working out backend stuff with a vanilla frontend, I used the provided Django authentication to handle user auth- but now that I'm creating a REST based app, I'm not sure how to approach authentication.

Since all user data will be either retrieved or submitted via the API, should API authentication be enough? If so, do I need to remove the existing Django authentication middleware?

Right now, when I try to hit API endpoints on an early version of the app, I'm directed to what looks like the normal Django login form. If I enter a valid username and password, it doesn't work- just prompts to login again. Would removing the basic Django authentication prevent this? I want to be prompted to login, however I'm not sure how to handle that with these technologies.

The package django-rest-auth seems useful, and the same group makes an Angular module- but the docs don't go much past installation and the provided endpoints. Ultimately, I think the core of this question is: how do I entirely switch authentication away from what's provided by Django to something like django-rest-auth or one of the other 3rd party packages recommended by DRF?

edit: I made this comment below, but I realized that I need to figure out how combined auth will work. I'm not building a single page app, so individual basic pages will be served from Django, but each page will hit various API endpoints to retrieve the data it needs. Is there a way to have something like django-rest-auth handle all authentication?

To anyone that stumbles onto this question, I couldn't figure out how to make the hybrid approach work. Having Django serve pages that each contained API calls seemed OK, but I never saw any requests made to the API- I believe due to some other security issues. I'm sure it's possible, but I decided to go for the single page app implementation after all to make things simpler.