How to use email instead of username for user authentication?

Question

The authentication model provided along with Django is based on username.

What to do to change the authentication based on email instead of username?

To be more specific:

With username authentication, to login user we do the following:

 user = authenticate(name,password)
 .......
 login(request,user)

What to write for the above statements if we are authenticating using email?

For form:

I am planning to write my own form which shows the fields email, password and the validation. Is this the correct approach?

Answer 1

Sounds like you can just mask the username with the word "email" and all the usernames will just have the email show up instead.

Answer 2

Check out this snippet, and read the comments for updates.

For the form, why not just inherit from (or directly use) the auth login form. See django/contrib/auth/forms.py

Answer 3

Please see the below link which illustrates the way in which we should solve the problem.

http://groups.google.com/group/django-users/browse_thread/thread/c943ede66e6807c

Answer 4

Unless I missed something, the solution should be really simple; just make a normal form with a text field and a password field. When the HTTP request method is POST, try to fetch the user with the given e-mail address. If such a user doesn't exist, you have an error. If the user does exist, try to authenticate the user and log her in.

Answer 5

I found this snippet when reading a duplicate question to this one. Also check this code:

class UserForm( forms.ModelForm ):
    class Meta:
        model= User
        exclude= ('email',)
    username = forms.EmailField(max_length=64,
        help_text = "The person's email address.")
    def clean_email( self ):
        email= self.cleaned_data['username']
        return email

class UserAdmin( admin.ModelAdmin ):
    form= UserForm
    list_display = ( 'email', 'first_name', 'last_name', 'is_staff' )
    list_filter = ( 'is_staff', )
    search_fields = ( 'email', )

admin.site.unregister( User )
admin.site.register( User, UserAdmin )

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Neither answer is originally mine. Up vote on the other thread to the owners for the karma boost. I just copied them here to make this thread as complete as possible.