Why can't I authenticate a Django user created from a custom manage.py command?

Question

This one has me completely stumped. I have a model which extends the base User model in Django, so I am writing a custom manage.py command to create superusers. It seems to be working fine, but for some reason any users that I create via this custom command cannot be authenticated by Django. When I check the database, the users are indeed being created and all of the information is correct.

Here's the code for my custom command in a file called createadmin.py (I've omitted the bits of code irrelevant to the problem):

from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand, CommandError
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = 'Creates a Django admin user'

    def handle(self, *args, **options):
        username = raw_input('Admin username: ')
        password = raw_input('Admin password: ')

        try:
            new_user = User.objects.create_user(username, password, '')
            new_user.is_superuser = True
            new_user.is_staff = True
            new_user.save()
            self.stdout.write('Admin created successfully')
        except:
            self.stdout.write('Sorry, there was a problem creating a new user in the database.')

Now, if I run this command using python manage.py createadmin, everything seems to work and the user is created in the database.

To demonstrate the problem, here is the output from testing with createadmin and shell:

createadmin

Admin username: testadmin
Admin password: admin
Admin created successfully

shell

>>> from django.contrib.auth.models import User
>>> from django.contrib.auth import authenticate
>>> user = User.objects.get(username='testadmin')
>>> user.is_superuser
True
>>> user.is_active
True
>>> user.is_staff
True
>>> authenticate(username='testadmin', password='admin') is None
True

So as you can see, the user exists, but I cannot authenticate them. I get similar behavior when I try to authenticate the user on the server from within a login view. Any ideas what could be the problem?

Answer 1

The second positional argument to create_user is email, not password.

You should use keyword arguments:

new_user = User.objects.create_user(username, password=password)