CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythondjango
ashishmohite
ashishmohite

Reputation: 1120

Whether to define own User model in django or use Django auth user model?

I am starting with Django App schema design and my schema has UserProfile, UserFavourites and UserComments models . After doing a bit research i found out that we can user django's own User model or we can create own user model which will extend from AbstractUser

Platform = Django 1.8.5

I have found many similar questions but now that i have newest version of Django framework has anything changed ?

Also need to know pros and cons of each approach

Upvotes: 0

Views: 372

Answers (2)

RemcoGerlich
RemcoGerlich

Reputation: 31260

In a new project, strongly consider starting out with a custom User model.

The reason is that if you want to change your User model later, then there is a clear way to do that (migrations). However, switching from a auth-User to a custom User when you already have ForeignKey relations (etc) to the auth-User is a major pain (see below). Considering that it is very easy to just start out with your own model at the start of a project (maybe just copy the auth model), there is very little reason not to.

The docs say this about how hard it is to change AUTH_USER_MODEL later:

Warning

Changing AUTH_USER_MODEL has a big effect on your database structure. It changes the tables that are available, and it will affect the construction of foreign keys and many-to-many relationships. If you intend to set AUTH_USER_MODEL, you should set it before creating any migrations or running manage.py migrate for the first time.

Changing this setting after you have tables created is not supported by makemigrations and will result in you having to manually fix your schema, port your data from the old user table, and possibly manually reapply some migrations.

Warning

Due to limitations of Django’s dynamic dependency feature for swappable models, you must ensure that the model referenced by AUTH_USER_MODEL is created in the first migration of its app (usually called 0001_initial); otherwise, you will have dependency issues.

In addition, you may run into a CircularDependencyError when running your migrations as Django won’t be able to automatically break the dependency loop due to the dynamic dependency. If you see this error, you should break the loop by moving the models depended on by your User model into a second migration (you can try making two normal models that have a ForeignKey to each other and seeing how makemigrations resolves that circular dependency if you want to see how it’s usually done)

In other words, if you choose not to use AUTH_USER_MODEL at the start of your project, it's almost impossible to change later.

There is a ticket #24370 for adding custom user model and AUTH_USER_MODEL setting to the default project template, and to recommend doing this in the documentation. This ticket is just waiting for someone to implement it.

Upvotes: 2

Lal
Lal

Reputation: 1628

Pulled from Django's documentation

If you wish to store information related to User, you can use a one-to-one relationship to a model containing the fields for additional information. This one-to-one model is often called a profile model, as it might store non-auth related information about a site user

So just add your extra user fields to UserProfile Model. Make a one-to-one relationship with each of your desired model

Upvotes: 2

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