How to programmatically trigger password reset email in django 1.7.6?

Question

I've encountered a problem where I had to load more than 200 new users into my django app and right away send them a password reset email. This had to happen only once, done only by me and run quietly on backend. Surfing the internet brought me only to one more or less right answer: Trigger password reset email in django without browser?. The only problem was is that this post was about 4 years old and of course when I tried the solution, it didn't work...

Answer 1

Two most valuable points from the link I mentioned:
1) In more recent version of Django we need to call form.is_valid()
2) Sending of email is done upon save().

Here is how I queried users that I needed and sent each of them a password reset link:

    def find_users_and_send_email():
       from django.http import HttpRequest
       from django.contrib.auth.forms import PasswordResetForm
       from django.contrib.auth.models import User

       users = User.objects.filter(date_joined__gt = '2015-04-16')
       for user in users:
       try:

        if user.email:
            log.info("Sending email for to this email:", user.email)
            form = PasswordResetForm({'email': user.email})

            assert form.is_valid()
            request = HttpRequest()
            request.META['SERVER_NAME'] = 'help.mydomain.com'
            request.META['SERVER_PORT'] = '443'
            form.save(
                request= request,
                use_https=True,
                from_email="username@gmail.com", 
                    email_template_name='registration/password_reset_email.html')

       except Exception as e:
          log.info(e)
          continue

return 'done'

1) Usually PasswordResetForm works with a "request" from the front-end, which I didn't have. So I simply created one.
2) When I followed the example in the link, it failed.. It couldn't find server name in the request. (Makes sense because I instantiated my request out of nowhere)
3) When I fixed server name, it asked for the server port. Since I used https, my port is 443, otherwise use default port. 4) If you use https, don't forget to indicate it when you save the form (use_https=True)

Answer 2

I found it useful to wrap @chabislav's answer up in a custom management command which can then be reused as necessary. Note that I eliminated the user object filter, as I knew that I wanted to send password reset instructions to all users.

# myproject/myapp/management/commands/send_password_reset_emails.py
from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand, CommandError
# I use a custom user model, so importing that rather than the standard django.contrib.auth.models
from users.models import User
from django.http import HttpRequest
from django.contrib.auth.forms import PasswordResetForm


class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = 'Emails password reset instructions to all users'

    def handle(self, *args, **kwargs):
        users = User.objects.all()
        for user in users:
            try:
                if user.email:
                    print("Sending email for to this email:", user.email)
                    form = PasswordResetForm({'email': user.email})
                    assert form.is_valid()
                    request = HttpRequest()
                    request.META['SERVER_NAME'] = 'www.example.com'
                    request.META['SERVER_PORT'] = 443
                    form.save(
                        request= request,
                        use_https=True,
                        from_email="admin@mysite.com", 
                        email_template_name='registration/password_reset_email.html'
                        )
            except Exception as e:
                print(e)
                continue

        return 'done'

This can then be run easily with python manage.py send_password_reset_emails.

Note that I got an error message (550, b'5.7.1 Relaying denied'), which ended up being an issue with the way that my localhost email server was set up, but once that was cleared this worked quite well. Having it in a management command is also nice because it doesn't clog up code that you use on a regular basis (views).