Create Your Custom User Model In Your Django Project

When you start a new project, one of the best things to do at the beginning is to create your custom user model

- Firstly: Create a new app for users.

$ python manage.py startapp users 

- Add it to the installed app in the settings.py file.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    # Project Apps
    'users.apps.UsersConfig',

]

- in the models.py create your custom model, we will use AbstractUser from django and then we can add new fields to our user model.

for example we will add an image.

# models.py
from django.contrib.auth.models import AbstractUser
from django.db import models


class CustomUser(AbstractUser):
    image = models.ImageField('Image', upload_to='user/images',
                               null=True, blank=True)

    class Meta:
        verbose_name = 'User'
        verbose_name_plural = 'Users'

    def __str__(self):
        return self.username

- In the settings.py add the Custom user settings

to inform Django to use our custom model for user instead of the default one.

AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'users.CustomUser'

- Register the model in the Django admin
we will use UserAdmin class and customize it as we need.

# admin.py 
from django.contrib import admin
from django.contrib.auth.admin import UserAdmin
from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model

User = get_user_model()


@admin.register(User)
class CustomUserAdmin(UserAdmin):
    model = User
    list_display = ['__str__', 'email', 'username',
                    'is_staff', 'is_superuser', ]
    list_filter = ['is_staff', 'is_superuser']
    fieldsets = (
        ('Login info', {'fields': ('username', 'password')}),
        ('Personal info', {'fields': ('first_name', 'last_name', 'image')}),
        ('Contact info', {'fields': ('email', )}),
        ('Permissions', {'fields': ('is_active', 'groups',
                                    'user_permissions')}),
    )

    add_fieldsets = (
        (None, {
            'classes': ('wide', ),
            'fields': ('email', 'username', 'image',
                       'password1', 'password2')}
         ),
    )
    search_fields = ('email', 'username')
    ordering = ('email', )

- Then run the migrations.

$ python manage.py makemigrations
$ python manage.py migrate

- Create a super user to test with.

$ python manage.py createsuperuser

And that's it! You got your own custom user model!

Stay tuned for the next article

We will fix an issue in Django, take a note of this article because we will continue upon it.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

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