Django BigInteger auto-increment field as primary key?

Question

I'm currently building a project which involves a lot of collective intelligence. Every user visiting the web site gets created a unique profile and their data is later used to calculate best matches for themselves and other users.

By default, Django creates an INT(11) id field to handle models primary keys. I'm concerned with this being overflown very quickly (i.e. ~2.4b devices visiting the page without prior cookie set up). How can I change it to be represented as BIGINT in MySQL and long() inside Django itself?

I've found I could do the following (http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/fields/#bigintegerfield):

class MyProfile(models.Model):
    id = BigIntegerField(primary_key=True)

But is there a way to make it autoincrement, like usual id fields? Additionally, can I make it unsigned so that I get more space to fill in?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Since Django 3.2 the type of implicit primary key can be controlled with the DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD setting (documentation). So, there is no need anymore to override primary keys in all your models.

#This setting will change all implicitly added primary keys to BigAutoField
DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD = 'django.db.models.BigAutoField'

Note that starting with Django 3.2 new projects are generated with DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD set to BigAutoField (release notes).