Public users that is, with public facing login forms. I want logged in (stateful) users to be able to have better access than stateless visitors.

• login form/logout
• password retreival
• password change
• {% if user.is_authenticated %} ... tags wherever I want in my templates

The intention is to be marginally more opinionated than native Django.

This project is designed to be a starting point (cookiecutter-style) whence you can make your own customisations.

I want to do this in a way that is using Django utilities and the Django "recommended" way as much as possible (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/).

Nothing fancy! Only modifying the following 2 attributes:

• using email as Login
• overriding built-in max_length

For fully featured (many bells-and-whistles) registration and authentication see:

• https://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/profiles/
• https://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/authentication/
• https://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/registration/
• https://www.djangopackages.com/packages/p/django-user-accounts/

Copy \accounts directory in to your project.

Optionally copy over the templates that you want from the \templates\accounts directory.

Add to your INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'accounts',
    ...
]

Add the following to your 'settings.py':

AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'accounts.Profile'
LOGIN_URL = 'accounts:login'
LOGOUT_URL = 'accounts:logout'
#LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL = '/' ## Can add if you want.

Add url(.., include('accounts.urls')) to urls.py, eg:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    ...
    ## Custom user models
    url(r'^profile/', include('accounts.urls')),
    ...
)

Modify /accounts/models.py to meet your needs. There is a bunch of handy stuff there but you can modify/delete however you'd like, eg:

class Profile(..):
    ...
    email = models.EmailField('email address', max_length=254, unique=True)
    """ Email to be used as username. """
    ...
    USERNAME_FIELD = 'email'
    ...

IMPORTANT: Custom user model + Migrations do not play well together

The script below modifies your migrations in order for them to work with custom user models:

https://github.com/elena/scripts.elena.github.io/blob/master/_posts/django/migrate_auth-replace/script.py

This is an imperfect solution (as frozen versions of the migrations are modified to being more general therefore less accurate).

Django migrations are changing rapidly in the next version so hopefully this will be repaired and this script will no longer be necessary.

Another solution is to write custom migration rules as is documented here: http://www.caktusgroup.com/blog/2013/08/07/migrating-custom-user-model-django/

Despite the simplicity of the some opinionation was necessary.

Firstly there is a major decision in to whether to extent or inherit from the built-in django.contrib.auth.User mode.

For an explanation about this watch this talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHg6AoExYjs

If you want just add some more basic attributes, you can:

class Employee(models.Model):
    user = models.OneToOneField(User)
    department = models.CharField(max_length=100)

If you want to change some of the important nuts-and-bolts built-in attributes, you can:

class MyUser(AbstractBaseUser):
    my_username =  models.CharField(max_length=40, unique=True,
                                    db_index=True)
    ...
    USERNAME_FIELD = 'my_username'

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/customizing/#extending-the-existing-user-model

Or alternatively (as is a common use case):

class MyUser(AbstractBaseUser):
    email =  models.EmailField(unique=True, db_index=True)
    ...
    USERNAME_FIELD = 'email'

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/fields/#emailfield

This project uses the more serious form to meet our only 2 feature requirements (which are: using email as login, overriding max_length)

This is named accounts and Profile in homage to the deprecated django docs.