Extending the User model with custom fields in Django

Question

What\'s the best way to extend the User model (bundled with Django\'s authentication app) with custom fields? I would also possibly like to use the email as the username (fo

Answer 1

Since Django 1.5 you may easily extend the user model and keep a single table on the database.

from django.contrib.auth.models import AbstractUser
from django.db import models
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

class UserProfile(AbstractUser):
    age = models.PositiveIntegerField(_("age"))

You must also configure it as current user class in your settings file

# supposing you put it in apps/profiles/models.py
AUTH_USER_MODEL = "profiles.UserProfile"

If you want to add a lot of users' preferences the OneToOneField option may be a better choice thought.

A note for people developing third party libraries: if you need to access the user class remember that people can change it. Use the official helper to get the right class

from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model

User = get_user_model()