Django User Management

Django User Management

Summary

Learning Goal:

Application with user login, registration, reset and change password feature
Edit the default django templates responsible for user management
Set password dreset emails to actual email addresses
Authenticate using an external service

Set up a Django Project

activate virtual environment

py -m venv venv
venv\Scripts\activate or source venv\bin\activate

[optional] upgrade pip

py -m pip install --upgrade pip

install django

pip install django

Start the project

django-admin startproject awesome_website
cd awesome_website
python manage.py startapp users

Note: we have created app named users not user

Add users to the INSTALLED_APPS in awesome_website/awesome_website/settings.py

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    "users",
    # ...,
]

Run Data migrations. The following commands migrate all models in our apps to the database

python manage.py migrate
python manage.py runserver

Note: cd into the directory that has manage.py. Our manage.py is at [root]/awesome_website/, where root is the main directory.

So that we should not need to set up a strong password everytime, we will comment out password validators in awesome_website/awesome_website/settings.py

AUTH_PASSWORD_VALIDATORS = [
    # {
    #     "NAME": "django.contrib.auth.password_validation.UserAttributeSimilarityValidator",
    # },
    # {
    #     "NAME": "django.contrib.auth.password_validation.MinimumLengthValidator",
    # },
    # {
    #     "NAME": "django.contrib.auth.password_validation.CommonPasswordValidator",
    # },
    # {
    #     "NAME": "django.contrib.auth.password_validation.NumericPasswordValidator",
    # },
]

Note: this is to make it easy for the development phase only. Enable these features when going to production.

Create a admin user

python manage.py createsuperuser

Create a Dashboard View

All template files will be kept inside awesome_website/users/templates/ The structure of the project will look like

awesome_website/
│
├── awesome_website/
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── asgi.py
│   ├── settings.py
│   ├── urls.py
│   └── wsgi.py
│
├── users/
│   │
│   ├── migrations/
│   │   └── __init__.py
│   │
│   ├── templates/
│   │   │
│   │   ├── registration/  ← Templates used by Django user management
│   │   │
│   │   ├── users/  ← Other templates of your application
│   │   │
│   │   └── base.html  ← The base template of your application
│   │
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── admin.py
│   ├── apps.py
│   ├── models.py
│   ├── tests.py
│   └── views.py
│
├── db.sqlite3
└── manage.py

Create a base template called base.html in users/templates/:

<h1>Welcome to Awesome Website</h1>
{% block content %} {% endblock %}

Other templates are going to use {%block content %} {% endblock %} to fill up their contents.

create another template users/templates/dashboard.html:

{% extends 'base.html' %} {% block content %} Hello, {{ user.username |
default:'Guest' }}! {% endblock %}

If the user isn't logged in, Django will set the user variable using an AnnonymousUser object, which is always empty. So, the dashboard will show Hello, Guest!

Set up views for the template to work:

from django.shortcuts import render

def dashboard(request):
    return render(request, "dashboard.html")

Create a users/urls.py and add the following:

from django.conf.urls import url
from users.views import dashboard

urlpatterns = [
    url(r"^dashboard/", dashboard, name="dashboard"),
]

Now, add the application's URL to the main project's URL

from django.conf.urls import include, url
from django.contrib import admin

urlpatterns = [
    url(r"^", include("users.urls")),
    url(r"^admin/", admin.site.urls),
]

Run the application python manage.py runserver and visit localhost:8000/dashboard/ or 127.0.0.1:8000/dashboard/. Note, localhost:8000 will give us a page not found error, and it okay because we have not set up any template for /.

Go to localhost:8000/admin/ and login as the admin user. Then, visit localhost:8000/dashboard/ again. Do you see a change?

Work with Django User Management

Django has a lot of user management-related resources that can handle login, logout, password change, and password reset. Templates needs to supplied by us though.

Add the URLs provided by the Django authentication system in users/urls.py:

from django.conf.urls import include, url
# from ...

urlpatterns = [
    url(r"^accounts/", include("django.contrib.auth.urls")),
    # url(r"^dashboard/", dashboard, name="dashboard"),
]

This will give us access to the following URLs:

accounts/login/ is used to log a user into the application. Refer to it by the name login
accounts/logout/ is used to log a user out of the application. Refer to it by the name logout
accounts/password_change/ is used to change a password. Refer to it by the name password_change
accounts/password_change/done is used to show a confirmation that a password was changed. Refer to it by the name password_change_done.
accounts/password_reset is used to request an email with a password reset link. Refer to it by the name password_reset
accounts/password_reset/done is used to show a confirmation that a password reset email was sent. Refer to it by the name password_reset_done.
accounts/reset/<uidb64>/<token>/ is used to set a new password using a password reset link. Refer to it by the name password_reset_confirm.
accounts/reset/done/ is used to show a confirmation that a password was reset. Refer to it by the name password_reset_complete.

Create a Login Page

For login page, Django will try to use a template called registration/login.html. So, create the file users/templates/registration/login.html

{% extends 'base.html' %} {% block content %}
<h2>Login</h2>

<form method="post">
  {% csrf_token %} {{ form.as_p }}
  <input type="submit" value="Login" />
</form>

<a href="{% url 'dashboard' %}">Back to dashboard</a>
{% endblock %}

Here, form is just a variable passed through context. Django uses this dictionary context to pass data to templates while rendering it. USing {{ form.as_p }} will render a series of HTML paragraphs which will look nicer than just {{ form }} Visit the link to learn about cross-site request forgery (CRSF) token, csrf_token.

Add some more CSS to improve the looks of users/templates/base.html:

<style>
  label,
  input {
    display: block;
  }
  span.helptext {
    display: none;
  }
</style>

<h1>Welcome to Awesome Website</h1>
<!-- ... -->

After logging in, we will get redirected to /accounts/profile which does not exist yet. So, we might see Page not found error.

The address /accounts/profile/ is a default destination for users after a successful login. Let's define another redirect url. In awesome_website/settings.py add the following at the end:

LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL = "dashboard"

This should fix the error.

Create a Logout Page

Let's define a redirect url for logout too. In awesome_website/settings.py add the following line at the end:

LOGOUT_REDIRECT_URL = "dashboard"

Let's add logout link to the dashboard and a link to login as well. In users/templates/users/dashboard.html add:

{% extends 'base.html' %} {% block content %} Hello, {{ user.username | default:
'Guest' }}!

<div>
  {% if user.is_authenticated %}
  <a href="{% url 'logout' %}">Logout</a>
  {% else %}
  <a href="{% url 'login' %}">Login</a> {% endif %}
</div>
{% endblock %}

Change Password

Django needs two templates to make this work:

registration/password_change_form.html to display the password change form
registration/password_change_done.html to show a confirmation that the password was successfully changed

Create registration/password_change_form.html:

{% extends 'base.html' %} {% block content %}
<h2>Change Password</h2>

<form method="post">
  {% csrf_token %} {{ form.as_p }}
  <input type="submit" value="Change" />
</form>
<a href="{% url 'dashboard' %}">Back to Dashboard</a>
{% endblock %}

This form look almost the same as login template. Howevedr, this time, Django will put a password change form here, not a login form, so that browser will display it differently.

Create registration/password_change_done.html

{% extends 'base.html' %} {% block content %}
<h2>Password changed</h2>

<a href="{% url 'dashboard' %}">Back to Dashboard</a>
{% endblock %}

This page will reassure the user that the password change was successful and let them go back to the dashboard.

Finally, add the link to the password change form at users/templates/dashboard.html:

<!-- ... -->
{% if user.is_authenticated %}
<!-- ... -->
<a href="{% url 'password_change' %}">Change Password</a>
<!-- add this -->
{% else %}
<!-- ... --->

Test the Change Password link when logged in. It should work. If you log out and a try to visit localhost:8000/accounts/password_change/ directly, Django will redirect you to the login page.

Send Password Reset Links

This functionality is a bit more complicated because, in oder to deliver password reset links, Django needs to send emails. For this tutorial however, we will set a local test server to confirm that the emails are sent. In the terminal run the command:

python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025

This will start the simple SMTP server at http://localhost:1025. It won't send any emails to the actual email addresses. Instead, it'll show the content of the messages in the command line.

All we need to do now is, let Django know that we are using it by adding the following lines at the end of the settings file awesome_website/settings.py:

EMAIL_HOST = 'localhost'
EMAIL_PORT = 1025

Now, Django needs two templates for sending password reset links:

registration/password_reset_form.html to display the form used to request a password reset email
registration/password_reset_done.html to show a confirmation that a password reset email was sent

Start by creating registration/password_reset_form.html:

{% extends 'base.html' %} {% block content %}
<h2>Send password reset link</h2>

<form method="post">
  {% csrf_token %} {{ form.as_p }}
  <input type="submit" value="Reset" />
</form>

<a href="{% url 'dashboard' %}">Back to Dashboard</a>
{% endblock %}

Add the confirmation template registration/password_reset_done.html:

{% extends 'base.html' %} {% block content %}
<h2>Password reset link sent</h2>

<a href="{% url 'login' %}">Back to login</a>
{% endblock %}

Also, add a link to the password reset form on the login page users/templates/registration/login.html

{% extends 'base.html' %}

<!-- ... -->

<!-- <a href="... -->
<a href="{% url 'password_reset' %}">Reset Password</a>
{% endblock %}

If you hit Reset Password from http://localhost/account/login and enter the admin email, you will get the following message in the server

---------- MESSAGE FOLLOWS ----------
b'Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"'
b'MIME-Version: 1.0'
b'Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit'
b'Subject: Password reset on localhost:8000'
b'From: webmaster@localhost'
b'To: <theusername>@gmail.com'
b'Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2020 13:26:51 -0000'
b'Message-ID: <160881641196.14116.9954328995282593482@DESKTOP-7V1GTOQ.lan1>'
b'X-Peer: ::1'
b''
b''
b"You're receiving this email because you requested a password reset for your user account at localhost:8000."
b''
b'Please go to the following page and choose a new password:'
b''
b'http://localhost:8000/accounts/reset/MQ/afdm4r-bc23b743255cfff65f6298882687a5dd/'
b''
b'Your username, in case you\xe2\x80\x99ve forgotten: root'
b''
b'Thanks for using our site!'
b''
b'The localhost:8000 team'

Reset Passwords

Password reset emails sent by Django contains a link that can be used to reset the password. To handle the link correctly, Djnago needs two more templates:

registration/password_reset_confirm.html to display the actual password reset form
registration/password_reset_complete.html to show a confirmation that a password was reset

Create registration/password_reset_confirm.html:

{% extends 'base.html' %} {% block content %}
<h2>Confirm Password Reset</h2>

<form method="post">
  {% csrf_token %} {{ form.as_p }}
  <input type="submit" value="Confirm" />
</form>
{% endblock %}

Add a confirmation template at users/templates/registration/password_reset_complete.html:

{% extends 'base.html' %} {% block content %}
<h2>Password Reset Complete</h2>

<a href="{% url 'login' %}">Back to login</a>
{% endblock %}

Change Email Templates

We need to create two files to change the email templates:

registration/password_reset_email.html determines the body of the email
registration/password_reset_subject.txt determines the subject of the email While we will be changing a few, Django provides a lot of other variables that we can use to compose our own messages.

Create users/templates/registration/password_reset_email.html

Someone requested to reset password for your email {{ email }}. Follow the link
below to reset the password: {{ protocol }}://{{ domain }}{% url
'password_reset_confirm' uidb64=uid token=token %}

Add Reset Password or any text you like in users/templates/registration/password_reset_subject.txt

Try resetting password again and you will see that the subject and the email message has changed.

Register New Users

Django doesn't provide user registration form out of the box. So we need to add our own. Django, however, provides UserCreationForm. UserCreationForm provides all necessary fields to create the user except the email form. So, what we will do is use almost the entire UserCreationForm and we will add one more email field.

Create users/forms.py and add a custom form there:

from django.contrib.auth.forms import UserCreationForm

class CustomUserCreationForm(UserCreationForm):
    class Meta(UserCreationForm.Meta):
        fields = UserCreationForm.Meta.fields + ("email",)

Here, our class CustomUserCreationForm extends Django's UserCreationForm. The inner class Meta keeps additional information about the form and in this case extends UserCreationForm.Meta, so almost everything from Django's form will be reused. We will just add email field.

Now that the form is ready, create a new view called register:

from django.contrib.auth import login
from django.shortcuts import redirect, render
from django.urls import reverse
from users.forms import CustomUserCreationForm

def dashboard(request):
    # ...

def register(request):
    if request.method == "GET":
        return render(
            request, "register.html",
            {"form": CustomUserCreationForm }
        )
    elif request.method == "POST":
        form = CustomUserCreationForm(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            user = form.save()
            login(request, user)
            return redirect(reverse("dashboard"))

request.method=="GET" checks if the request is 'GET'. It renders users/register.html if it is the case. The last argument of render() is a context, which contains "form": CustomUserCreationForm If the form is submitted, the view will be accessed by a POST method. In that case, Django will attempt to create a user. A new CustomUserCreationForm is created using the values submitted to the form through request.POST object. If the form inputs are valid, then a new user is created using form.save(). The user is logged in using login() and user redirected to dashboard.

Add URL for the registration view:

from django.conf.urls import include, url
from user.views import dashboard, register

urlpatterns = [
    # ...,
    # ...,
    url(r"^register/", register, name="register"),
]

Finally, add a link to the registration form on the login page users/templates/registration/login.html:

<!-- ... -->

<a href="{% url 'register' %}">Register</a>
{% endblock %}

Create a register template at users/templates/register.html:

{% extends 'base.html' %} {% block content %}
<h2>Register</h2>

<form method="post">
  {% csrf_token %} {{ form }}
  <input type="submit" value="Register" />
</form>

<a href="{% url 'login' %}">Back to Login</a>
{% endblock %}

Add link to registration at users/templates/registration/login.html

<!--... -->
<a href="{% url 'register' %}">Register</a>
{% endblock %}

Send Emails to the Outside World

Go to mailgun and create an account. Go to Sending, click on sandbox domain. Choose SMTP: Scroll down and collect the following information:

SMTP hostname
Port
Username
Default Password

In awesome_website/settings.py add the following:

EMAIL_HOST = "smtp.mailgun.org"
EMAIL_PORT = 587
EMAIL_HOST_USER = os.environ.get("EMAIL_HOST_USER")
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = os.environ.get("EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD")
EMAIL_USE_TLS = True

Note: I have used os.getenv("XXXX") in my settings.py. It works the same way as os.environ.get("XXXX").

We have set the values for EMAIL_HOST_USER and EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD to some variables stored in the os environment. Let's set those environment variables: Windows in Powershell:

$env:EMAIL_HOST_USER="the username we collected from mailgun"
$env:EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD="the password we collected from mailgun"

You can check the value of the variables for example by doing echo $EMAIL_HOST_USER. The same command will probably work for linux/mac too. If it returns a value then, you know that the value has been store in the environment. If it doesn't return any value, there is a problem.

Linux/Mac:

export EMAIL_HOST_USER="the username we collected from mailgun"
export EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD="the password we collected from mailgun"

Visit http://localhost:8000/accounts/password_reset/ and enter a email address you have access to and is also in the data base to test if it works.

Login With Github

We will use the Python module social-auth-app-django for this authentication. Read more about it here.

Set up social authentication

pip install social-auth-app-django

Add it to the INSTALLED_APPS in awesome_website/settings.py

INSTALLED_APPS = [
  "users",
  "social_django",
  # " ...",
]

Add the following context processors to TEMPLATES at awesome_website/settings.py

TEMPLATES =[
  {
    # ...
    "OPTIONS":{
      "context_processors":[
        # ...,
        "social_django.context_processors.backends",
        "social_django.context_processors.login_redirect",
      ]
    }
  }
]

Apply migrations:

python manage.py migrate

Include the social authentication URLs in the application at users/urls.py

# from ...

urlpatterns = [
  # ...,
  url(r"^oauth/", include("social_django.urls")),
  # ...,
]

Note: ^ Caret - matches the start of the string.

By default, Django settings don't specify authentication backends, and the default backend used by Django is django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend. So to use, social authentication, we have to create a new value in settings: add the following in awesome_website/settings.py:

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = [
  "django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend", # default one used by django for standard users
  "social_core.backends.github.GithubOAuth2", # used for Github and other Social logins
]

Note: As you get into bigger projects, having to use two separate authentication backends might become unreliable. That's why there is a package like django-allauth which attempts to combine both standard user login and social login.

Lastly, lets add link to the Github login on our page users/templates/registration/login.html

{% extends 'base.html' %}

<!--... -->

<a href="{% url 'social:begin' 'github' %}">Login with GitHub</a>
<!--<a href=... -->
{% endblock %}

Now, we need to create a Github application. Go to the link Fill up the fields with:

Application Name: "name of your choice"
Homepage URL: "http://localhost:8000/" or "http://127.0.0.1:8000/"
Authorization callback URL: "http://localhost:8000/oauth/complete/github/" or "http://127.0.0.1:8000/oauth/complete/github/"

Click Generate a new client secret to generate a github key. Record Client ID and Client secret

Add the following lines in awesome_website/settings.py

SOCIAL_AUTH_GITHUB_KEY = os.environ.get("SOCIAL_AUTH_GITHUB_KEY")
SOCIAL_AUTH_GITHUB_SECRET = os.environ.get("SOCIAL_AUTH_GITHUB_SECRET")

Pass the values for Client ID and Client Secret through the environment Windows

$env:SOCIAL_AUTH_GITHUB_KEY="the ID we collected from github"
$env:SOCIAL_AUTH_GITHUB_SECRET="the secret key we collected from github"

Linux/Mac:

export SOCIAL_AUTH_GITHUB_KEY="the ID we collected from github"
export SOCIAL_AUTH_GITHUB_SECRET="the secret key we collected from github"

After adding, start the server python manage.py runserver.

Try signing in with Github. It should work.

But with this github signin, we will not be authorized to sign into admin dashboard. If we try to access localhost:8000/admin/, the following error will arise

You are authenticated as [github-username], but are not authorized to access this page. Would you like to login to a different account?

If we sign into the admin dashboard with a admin account, we will see that a new user has been added with a github username, but there is no password and email.

Here, by enabling Github login, we accidentally broke the normal user creation process.

Select Authentication Backend

The error occured because Django previously had 1 default authentication backend, but now it has two. Django doesn't know which one to use when creating new user, so we'll have to help it decide. To do that replace the user=form.save() in the registration view users/views.py with the indicated codes below:

# from ...

# def dashboard(...)

def register(request):
  # if ...
  elif request.method == "POST":
    form = CustomUserCreationForm(request.POST)
    if form.is_valid():
      user = form.save(commit=False) # replace with this line
      user.backend = "django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend" # replace with this line
      user.save() # and replace with this line
      # ...

Because we used commit=False, the user created from the github is not immediately saved. This way, we can have both normal user creation and social media authentication in the same Django user management system. I'm not sure about the last sentence though.

Thanks to RealPathon for this great tutorial. Ideas are welcome at discussions. Post issues here.

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
Latest commit History 3 Commits
awesome_website		awesome_website
.gitignore		.gitignore
Readme.md		Readme.md
final-app.gif		final-app.gif
requirements.txt		requirements.txt

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Django User Management

Summary

Set up a Django Project

activate virtual environment

Start the project

Create a Dashboard View

Work with Django User Management

Create a Login Page

Create a Logout Page

Change Password

Send Password Reset Links

Reset Passwords

Change Email Templates

Register New Users

Send Emails to the Outside World

Login With Github

Select Authentication Backend

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elabdesunil/django-user-management

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Django User Management

Summary

Set up a Django Project

activate virtual environment

Start the project

Create a Dashboard View

Work with Django User Management

Create a Login Page

Create a Logout Page

Change Password

Send Password Reset Links

Reset Passwords

Change Email Templates

Register New Users

Send Emails to the Outside World

Login With Github

Select Authentication Backend

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