Django 1.8+ extending the User model

Question

I know this question has been asked hundreds of times, but most of them contain -accepted- answers that are not valid anymore. Some of them are for Django 1.5, some of them are

Answer 1

An article about the topic: How to Extend Django User Model

What I use is the One-To-One approach:

class UserProfile(models.Model):
    user = models.OneToOneField(User, related_name="profile")
    #more fields

    @staticmethod
    @receiver(post_save, sender=User, dispatch_uid="at_user_post_save")
    def user_post_save(sender, instance, **kwargs):
        #create new profile on user.save() (if necessary)
        profile, new = UserProfile.objects.get_or_create(user=instance)


#in view
profile = request.user.profile

UPDATE:

Are there any other caveats? Like what happens when I remove a UserProfile?

UserProfile is the one who holds the relation, so on delete no user should be deleted. You can control what must be the behavior when a user gets deleted via the on_delete kwarg.

Also do they always have the same private keys?

No each class have its own PKs, just the UserProfile holds the PK to its user.

OneToOneField is in conceptually a ForeignKey with an unique=True, the big difference is that the reverse side of the relation do not return a list with 0/1 elements, but the element itself or raise DoesNotExist or None if null=True.

The only thing which I don't like in this approach is that you always have to do 1 more query to get user.profile. I still can't find a good and clean approach to always .select_related('profile') when a new user is fetched from auth, but this is more of a problem of the authentication system rather than the approach itself.

Answer 2

First req for extending the user model: you have to start with a clean django project that you have not called the: "python manage.py migrate" command on.

This is because if you did migrated in the past, the un-extanded user model is already created an django doesn't know how to change it.

Now, to choose another user model the first thing you have to do is on your settings.py:

AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'APPNAME.Account'

It is recommended to create a new app to handle the user model. be aware not to call the app "account", as it collides with the already existing user model.

I created An app called accountb. on the models:

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import UserManager
from django.contrib.auth.models import AbstractUser

class AccountManager(UserManager):
    def create_user(self, email, password=None, **kwargs):
        if not email:
            raise ValueError('Users must have a valid email address.')
        if not kwargs.get('username'):
            raise ValueError('Users must have a valid username.')

        account = self.model(
            email=self.normalize_email(email), 
            username=kwargs.get('username'), 
            year_of_birth = kwargs.get('year_of_birth'),
            #MODEL = kwargs.get('MODEL_NAME'),
        )
        account.set_password(password)
        account.save()

        return account

    def create_superuser(self, email, password, **kwargs):
        account = self.create_user(email, password, **kwargs)
        account.is_staff = True
        account.is_superuser = True
        account.save()

        return account

class Account(AbstractUser):
    email = models.EmailField(unique=True)
    #ADD YOUR MODELS HERE

    objects = AccountManager()

    def __str__(self):
        return self.email

Also, dont forget to register it on admin.py:

from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Account

admin.site.register(Account)

Answer 3

django-registration supports custom user models, so it won't be a problem to create your own user model and use it with django-registration.

All you need to do is to create registration form based on registration.forms.RegistrationForm and then use it in RegistrationView. You also need to keep email and is_active fields from default django user model and provide email_user method in user model. USERNAME_FIELD also must be specified. Other requirements depends of your authentication method.

More on that you can find in django-registration docs.