A couple more days at this and I eventually worked out the issues myself, and learned a little more about how Django works too.
The link I was missing was how/where context processors from (third party) Django modules pass their context's through to the page that's eventually rendered. I didn't realise that variables from the microsoft_auth package (such as the authorisation_url used in its template) were accessible to me in any of my templates by default as well. Knowing this, I was able to implement a slightly simpler version of the same JS based login process that the admin panel uses.
Assuming that anyone reading this in the future is going through the same (learning) process I have (with this package in particular), I might be able to guess at the next couple of questions you'll have...
The first one was "I've logged in successfully...how do I do anything on behalf of the user?!". One would assume you'd be given the user's access token to use for future requests, but at the time of writing this package didn't seem to do it in any obvious way by default. The docs for the package only get you as far as logging into the admin panel.
The (in my opinion, not so obvious answer) is that you have to set MICROSOFT_AUTH_AUTHENTICATE_HOOK to a function that can be called on a successful authentication. It will be passed the logged in user (model) and their token JSON object for you to do with as you wish. After some deliberation, I opted to extend my user model using AbstractUser and just keep each user's token with their other data.
models.py
class User(AbstractUser):
access_token = models.CharField(max_length=2048, blank=True, null=True)
id_token = models.CharField(max_length=2048, blank=True, null=True)
token_expires = models.DateTimeField(blank=True, null=True)
aad.py
from datetime import datetime
from django.utils.timezone import make_aware
def store_token(user, token):
user.access_token = token["access_token"]
user.id_token = token["id_token"]
user.token_expires = make_aware(datetime.fromtimestamp(token["expires_at"]))
user.save()
settings.py
MICROSOFT_AUTH_EXTRA_SCOPES = "User.Read"
MICROSOFT_AUTH_AUTHENTICATE_HOOK = "django_app.aad.store_token"
Note the MICROSOFT_AUTH_EXTRA_SCOPES setting, which might be your second/side question - The default scopes set in the package as SCOPE_MICROSOFT = ["openid", "email", "profile"], and how to add more isn't made obvious. I needed to add User.Read at the very least. Keep in mind that the setting expects a string of space separated scopes, not a list.
Once you have the access token, you're free to make requests to the Microsoft Graph API. Their Graph Explorer is extremely useful in helping out with this.