Best practice for email required in django-rest-auth

Question

What is the best (easiest?) way to make it a requirement to have an email only for user registration and not make username a requirement in the django-rest-auth framework?

Would I need to write a new User Serializer, for example? Is there a flag setting that I can set True or False to turn off or on this requirement instead?

Thanks

Answer 1

You'll need to write your own AbstractUser and BaseUserManager classes. Fortunately it's pretty simple, add something like this to your app's models:

from django.contrib.auth.models import AbstractBaseUser, BaseUserManager
from django.db import models

class Account(AbstractBaseUser):
    email = models.EmailField(unique=True)
    username = models.CharField(max_length=40, unique=True, blank=True)

    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=40, blank=True)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=40, blank=True)

    is_admin = models.BooleanField(default=False)

    created_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    updated_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)

    objects = AccountManager()

    # This tells Django that this field is absolutely important...
    USERNAME_FIELD = 'email'
    # ...and username is now optional because it doesn't show up here!
    REQUIRED_FIELDS = []

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.email

    def get_full_name(self):
        return ' '.join([self.first_name, self.last_name])

    def get_short_name(self):
        return self.first_name

class AccountManager(BaseUserManager):
    def create_user(self, email, password=None):
        if not email:
            raise ValueError('User must provide an e-mail address')

        account = self.model(
            email=self.normalize_email(email)
        )

        account.set_password(password)
        account.save()

        return account

    def create_superuser(self, email, password=None):
        account = self.create_user(email, password)

        account.is_admin = True
        account.save()

        return account

Next, tell Django that this model is your project's new User class. Add the following to your settings.py file:

AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'apiapp.Account'

Once that's done, just migrate:

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate

From that point on new users will be represented by this new model (you'd have to handle migrations manually), including anywhere you might use self.request.user!