Django authentication with custom user model with email-id as unique key

Question

to achieve unique constraint (without repetition of default user models fields) on email-id I did this

from django.contrib.auth.models import AbstractUser
class User(AbstractUser):
    # some extra fields
    class Meta:
        unique_together = ('email', )

and then in settings file AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'myApp.User'

mysql table shows both column(username and email) as UNI key.

so far looks good but when it comes to authentication I'm not sure where I'm making mistake. but its not working/loggin-in

this code works when username is the unique key and we login through username instead of email.

any help/leads would be appreciated.

EDIT: do i have to write custom modelBackend (explained here http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2008/08/21/extending-the-django-user-model-with-inheritance/) but not sure how, I see lots of code here https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/django/contrib/auth/init.py

Rajesh Kaushik Rajesh Kaushik · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-11T09:15:28

You need to define backends.py like this:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User, check_password

class EmailAuthBackend(object):
"""
Email Authentication Backend

Allows a user to sign in using an email/password pair rather than
a username/password pair.
"""

def authenticate(self, username=None, password=None):
    """ Authenticate a user based on email address as the user name. """
    try:
        user = User.objects.get(email=username)
        if user.check_password(password):
            return user
    except User.DoesNotExist:
        return None 

def get_user(self, user_id):
    """ Get a User object from the user_id. """
    try:
        return User.objects.get(pk=user_id)
    except User.DoesNotExist:
        return None

And in your settings file add this:

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = ('backends.EmailAuthBackend',)

This will enable the login with email.

For more details visit this.

Django authentication with custom user model with email-id as unique key

1 Answers