I've been meaning to experiment with user authentication in Django for awhile now, but I kept putting it off. I finally created a new pet project and decided that user authentication was the first thing I wanted to set up for my project.
Django has a built-in User model but the Django documentation highly encourages us to set up a custom user model. Just in case you need to customise it at some point. Even if you have no need for it right now. Looking at the Django documentation was really overwhelming(surprise!) so I looked around for a tutorial I could follow. I've already started a project, so I had to fit whatever tutorial into what I had already set up. The learndjango tutorial(link below) seemed easy enough to follow.
Step 1 : Create a 'User' app
Done.
Step 2: Create the initial custom user model
First, I had to add 'users.apps,UsersConfig' to the INSTALLED_APPS.
mainapp/settings.py
Next, I had to tell Django to use my custom user model.
mainapp/settings.py
Time to create a new User model in the 'users' app. If I wanted to include any additional fields beyond the built-in ones, this is where they would go. So far, so good.
users/models.py
Now I needed to create a forms.py in my users app and fill it with the following forms:
users/forms.py
And finally, for the first time ever, I had to add some code to the admin.py, makemigrations and migrate.
users/admin.py
Step 3: Creating my templates
The tutorial then instructs us to make changes to the project's settings.py to tell Django ti use the templates directory. I had already done this previously when I first set up my project, but here it is. The syntax I used is for Django 3.1
mainapp/settings.py
I also added the redirect links for logins and logouts.
mainapp/settings.py
Next, it was template creation time for the login and registration pages. I created my templates that rendered the registration page and the login page. In the tutorial, they used the inbuilt django url paths by including 'django.contrib.auth.urls'. The url path is commented out below because I later decided to add more customisation.
mainapp/urls.py
Including the built in url paths like they did in the tutorial meant including the url paths in the screenshot below.
From the Django Docs
I continued following the tutorial to set up my registration page.
users/urls.py
users/views.py
Now, for the changes I made after commenting out the url path from the tutorial(above). I wanted to put my templates in my users app's templates folder. I also wanted to rename the url paths, so this is what I did to further customise my url paths:
users/urls.py
I now had a custom url path for Django's built-in login view that included a custom name for the path and a custom filepath to my custom html template. But wait, I needed to make some changes to the code I put in previously. I changed the success_url to my custom user login path.
users/views.py
The register and login pages render and function as they should. They're still hideous at present because they haven't been styled but I'm glad I got it working for now!
Happiness :)
Login page
Registration page
References:
https://consideratecode.com/2018/03/05/django-authentication-views-login-logout/
https://learndjango.com/tutorials/django-custom-user-model
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/ref/contrib/auth/#django.contrib.auth.models.User
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/topics/auth/customizing/
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/topics/auth/default/
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