To start, create a new Django project from the command line. We need to do several things:
create and navigate into a dedicated directory called accounts for our code install Django make a new Django project called django_project make a new app accounts start the local web server
There are two modern ways to create a custom user model in Django: AbstractUser and AbstractBaseUser. In both cases we can subclass them to extend existing functionality however AbstractBaseUser requires much, much more work. Seriously, don’t mess with it unless you really know what you’re doing.
Creating our initial custom user model requires four steps:
update django_project/settings.py create a new CustomUser model create new UserCreation and UserChangeForm update the admin In settings.py we’ll add the accounts app and use the AUTH_USER_MODEL config to tell Django to use our new custom user model in place of the built-in User model. We’ll call our custom user model CustomUser.
It’s helpful to create a superuser that we can use to log in to the admin and test out log in/log out. On the command line type the following command and go through the prompts.
(.venv) > python manage.py createsuperuser
1.Our goal is a homepage with links to log in, log out, and sign up. Start by updating settings.py to use a project-level templates directory.
TEMPLATES = [ { … “DIRS”: [BASE_DIR / “templates”], # new … }, ]
2.for our urls.py files at the project and app level:
Create a urls.py file in the accounts app using the touch command on macOS or your text editor on Windows. (.venv) > touch accounts/urls.py
3.Last step is our views.py file in the accounts app which will contain our signup form.