Question

I’m using the UserModel and the UserCreationForm in Django. However, instead of requiring a username, I want to use the customer’s email as the login information (i.e. completely bypass / ignore the username field).

1. How do I go about making the username field to be optional in the User Model
2. How do I turn email into the customer’s “username”? In turn, how do I make this email field to be required then?

Answer 1

1.) Just make the username field optional in your form and to the model pass the email as the username, after stripping out ‘@’ from the email.

2) Create a custom authentication backend (this will accept either the username or email):

from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class EmailOrUsernameModelBackend(object):
    def authenticate(self, username=None, password=None):
        if '@' in username:
            kwargs = {'email': username}
        else:
            kwargs = {'username': username}
        try:
            user = User.objects.get(**kwargs)
            if user.check_password(password):
                return user
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return None

    def get_user(self, user_id):
        try:
            return User.objects.get(pk=user_id)
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return None

chage your settings accordingly :

AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
    'myoursite.backends.EmailOrUsernameBackend', # Custom Authentication to accept usernamee or email
)