Django & React - Session Authentication

I am using session authentication in my Django - React application.
But no session cookie is stored in the cookie storage.
(A csrf token cookie is stored!)

I cleared the local storage / session storage and the cookies
I tried with different browsers

On the frontend Part,
I make a post request for the login:

axios.defaults.xsrfCookieName = "csrftoken";
axios.defaults.xsrfHeaderName = "X-CSRFToken";
axios.defaults.withCredentials = true;

const client = axios.create({
  baseURL: "http://127.0.0.1:8000",
});

  function submitLogin(e) {
    e.preventDefault();
    setIsLoading(true);
    client
      .post("/login", {
        email: email,
        password: password,
      })
      .then(function (res) {
        setCurrentUser(true);
        window.location.reload(); // Refresh the page after login
      })
      .catch(function (error) {
        setIsLoading(false);
      });
  }

I get a status code 200, user is logged in everything seems to work fine.
(When opening the application in a incognito window the log in is not working!)

Also I get a SameSite attribute error in dev tools:

> Indicate whether to send a cookie in a cross-site request by
> specifying its SameSite attribute

even though I set everything in settings.py:

SESSION_ENGINE = 'django.contrib.sessions.backends.db'
SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = False  # Set it to False during development with HTTP
SESSION_COOKIE_HTTPONLY = True
SESSION_COOKIE_SAMESITE = 'None'  # If using cross-site requests
SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = True  # If using HTTPS

note that when setting

SESSION_COOKIE_SAMESITE = 'lax' or 'strict'

and removing

SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = True  # If using HTTPS

the log in no longer works

I also tried without setting the SESSION_ENGINE and using the default but that makes no difference (the login works but no cookie)

On the backend site I use a custom User model
This is my UserLogin View:

class UserLogin(APIView):

	permission_classes = (permissions.AllowAny,)
	authentication_classes = (SessionAuthentication,)

    def post(self, request):
    		data = request.data
    		assert validate_email(data)
    		assert validate_password(data)
    		serializer = UserLoginSerializer(data=data)
    		if serializer.is_valid(raise_exception=True):
    			user = serializer.check_user(data)
    			login(request, user)
    			return Response(serializer.data, status=status.HTTP_200_OK)

I included corsheaders in the INSTALLED_APPS and in the MIDDLEWARE right at the top I put

"corsheaders.middleware.CorsMiddleware",

also I added:

CORS_ALLOW_ALL_ORIGINS = True
CORS_ALLOW_CREDENTIALS = True

All other requests from frontend to backend work fine!

I am also pretty sure rest framework is configured correctly I included rest_framework in the INSTALLED_APPS and:

REST_FRAMEWORK = { 
    'DEFAULT_PERMISSION_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.permissions.IsAuthenticated',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_AUTHENTICATION_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.authentication.SessionAuthentication',
    ),
}

Why is no session cookie stored?

try this way :
in this I remove the duplicate line SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE

SESSION_ENGINE = 'django.contrib.sessions.backends.db'
SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = True  # If using HTTPS
SESSION_COOKIE_HTTPONLY = True
SESSION_COOKIE_SAMESITE = 'None'  # If using cross-site requests
  

When you use SessionAuthentication, by default django requires 2 things

1. cookies-key when a logged-in user is active
2. csrf-token

If these do not match, then an error is raised, so, there is the documentation to make it authenticate in the correct way.<br>
When you are using SessionAuthentication, you are using Django's authentication which usually requires CSRF to be checked. So you must pass the CSRF token in the X-CSRFToken header.

This documentation provides more information on retrieving the CSRF token and sending it in requests. The CSRF token is saved as a cookie called csrftoken that you can retrieve from a HTTP response.

If you cannot retrieve the CSRF cookie, this is usually a sign that you should not be using SessionAuthentication (use TokenAuthentication or OAuth 2.0 instead).