About Django Custom User Model

• There is a far easier yet still powerful approach to starting off new Django projects with a custom user model which I’ll demonstrate here.

Setup

• To start, create a new Django project from the command line. We need to do several things:
• create and navigate into a dedicated directory called accounts for our code
• install Django
• make a new Django project called config
• make a new app accounts
• start the local web server

Here are the commands to run:

$ cd ~/Desktop
$ mkdir accounts && cd accounts
$ pipenv install django~=3.1.0
$ pipenv shell
(accounts) $ django-admin.py startproject config .
(accounts) $ python manage.py startapp accounts
(accounts) $ python manage.py runserver

AbstractUser vs AbstractBaseUser

• There are two modern ways to create a custom user model in Django: AbstractUser and AbstractBaseUser. In both cases we can subclass them to extend existing functionality however AbstractBaseUser requires much, much more work.

Custom User Model

• Creating our initial custom user model requires four steps:

• update config/settings.py
• create a new CustomUser model
• create new UserCreation and UserChangeForm
• update the admin

• In settings.py we’ll add the accounts app and use the AUTH_USER_MODEL config to tell Django to use our new custom user model in place of the built-in User model. We’ll call our custom user model CustomUser.

• Within INSTALLED_APPS add accounts at the bottom. Then at the bottom of the entire file, add the AUTH_USER_MODEL config.