Extending the User model with custom fields in Django

Question

What's the best way to extend the User model (bundled with Django's authentication app) with custom fields? I would also possibly like to use the email as the username (for authentication purposes).

I've already seen a few ways to do it, but can't decide on which one is the best.

Answer 1

There is an official recommendation on storing additional information about users. The Django Book also discusses this problem in section Profiles.

Answer 2

The least painful and indeed Django-recommended way of doing this is through a ForeignKey(User) property.

That said, extending django.contrib.auth.models.User also works better now -- ever since the refactoring of Django's inheritance code in the models API.

I would definitely stay away from changing the actual User class in your Django source tree and/or copying and altering the auth module.

Answer 3

The below one is another approach to extend an User. I feel it is more clear,easy,readable then above two approaches.

http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2008/08/21/extending-the-django-user-model-with-inheritance/

Using above approach:

1. you don't need to use *user.get_profile().newattribute* to access the additional information related to the user
2. you can just directly access additional new attributes via user.newattribute

Answer 4

Sometimes, this is all you need : http://www.alrond.com/en/2008/may/03/monkey-patching-in-django/

Answer 5

This is how I do it.

#in models.py
from django.db.models.signals import post_save  

class UserProfile(models.Model):  
    user = models.ForeignKey(User)  
    #other fields here

    def __str__(self):  
          return "%s's profile" % self.user  

def create_user_profile(sender, instance, created, **kwargs):  
    if created:  
       profile, created = UserProfile.objects.get_or_create(user=instance)  

post_save.connect(create_user_profile, sender=User) 

#in settings.py
AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE = 'YOURAPP.UserProfile'

This will create a userprofile each time a user is saved if it is created. You can then use

  user.get_profile().whatever

Here is some more info from the docs

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#storing-additional-information-about-users