Django Custom User

Django Best Practices: Custom User Model

Django ships with a built-in User model for authentication and if you’d like a basic tutorial on how to implement log in, log out, sign up and so on see the Django Login and Logout tutorial for more.

However, for a real-world project, the official Django documentation highly recommends using a custom user model instead. This provides far more flexibility down the line so, as a general rule, always use a custom user model for all new Django projects.

Setup

To start, create a new Django project from the command line. We need to do several things:

create and navigate into a dedicated directory called accounts for our code
install Django
make a new Django project called config
make a new app accounts
start the local web server

server

AbstractUser vs AbstractBaseUser

There are two modern ways to create a custom user model in Django: AbstractUser and AbstractBaseUser. In both cases we can subclass them to extend existing functionality however AbstractBaseUser requires much, much more work. Seriously, don’t mess with it unless you really know what you’re doing. And if you did, you wouldn’t be reading this tutorial, would you?

So we’ll use AbstractUser which actually subclasses AbstractBaseUser but provides more default configuration.

Custom User Model

Creating our initial custom user model requires four steps:

update config/settings.py
create a new CustomUser model
create new UserCreation and UserChangeForm
update the admin

Superuser

It’s helpful to create a superuser that we can use to log in to the admin and test out log in/log out. On the command line type the following command and go through the prompts.

(accounts) $ python manage.py createsuperuser

Templates/Views/URLs

Our goal is a homepage with links to log in, log out, and sign up. Start by updating settings.py to use a project-level templates directory.

# config/settings.py
TEMPLATES = [
    {
        ...
        'DIRS': [str(BASE_DIR.joinpath('templates'))], # new
        ...
    },
]