Can I change the USERNAME_FIELD in Django 1.5 without creating a custom user?

Question

I am trying to use the email field in the default Django user model as the username. I am using Django 1.5 and I saw that the default user has a USERNAME_FIELD property.

In my project, I would like to set the following USERNAME_FIELD = 'email' as a default in the user model.

This small but fundamental tweak is the only thing I would like to change in the user model. I was wondering if there is a way of changing the USERNAME_FIELD without having to subclass the AbstractUser. I saw in this question that you can subclass the AbstractUser and write a custom manager for it.

So I was wondering if there is a simpler way of changing that property?

And if not, what would be the minimal way of extending the AbstractUser to use the email field as username?

Villeneuve

use AbstraceBaseUser instead – Smelser

@Smelser If you Subclass AbstractUser you end up in these problems:#16605953 and #16601912 – Dominus

Answer 1

#Your app's __init__.py

from django.contrib.auth.models import User

User.USERNAME_FIELD = 'email'

Illjudged

This raises the error "django.core.management.base.CommandError: One or more models did not validate: auth.user: The field named as the USERNAME_FIELD should not be included in REQUIRED_FIELDS on a swappable User model. auth.user: The USERNAME_FIELD must be unique. Add unique=True to the field parameters." for me. – Woolworth

Same problem with me... I wonder if there have been any changes that break this between Mar '13 and May '13 or so. I would have really liked for this to work.. – Kelley

Answer 2

You have to write a new Custom User Class by extending the AbstractBaseUser and not AbstractUser

Declare your email as the USERNAME_FIELD there

Optionally you can also declare a custom user manager that extends from BaseUserManager to handle the username required constraint. You can remove username from that manager's create_user function

Wald