In this tutorial series, we are going to explore Django’s authentication system by implementing sign up, login, logout, password change, password reset and protected views from non-authenticated users. This tutorial is organized in 8 videos, one for each topic, ranging from 4 min to 15 min each.
Starting a Django project from scratch, creating a virtual environment and an initial Django app. After that, we are going to setup the templates and create an initial view to start working on the authentication.
If you are already familiar with Django, you can skip this video and jump to the Sign Up tutorial below.
First thing we are going to do is implement a sign up view using the built-in UserCreationForm
. In this video you
are also going to get some insights on basic Django form processing.
In this video tutorial we are going to first include the built-in Django auth URLs to our project and proceed to implement the login view.
In this tutorial we are going to include Django logout and also start playing with conditional templates, displaying different content depending if the user is authenticated or not.
Next The password change is a view where an authenticated user can change their password.
This tutorial is perhaps the most complicated one, because it involves several views and also sending emails. In this video tutorial you are going to learn how to use the default implementation of the password reset process and how to change the email messages.
After implementing the whole authentication system, this video gives you an overview on how to protect some views from
non authenticated users by using the @login_required
decorator and also using class-based views mixins.
Extra video showing how to integrate Django with Bootstrap 4 and how to use Django Crispy Forms to render Bootstrap forms properly. This video also include some general advices and tips about using Bootstrap 4.
If you want to learn more about Django authentication and some extra stuff related to it, like how to use Bootstrap to make your auth forms look good, or how to write unit tests for your auth-related views, you can read the forth part of my beginners guide to Django: A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Django - Part 4 - Authentication.
Of course the official documentation is the best source of information: Using the Django authentication system
The code used in this tutorial: github.com/sibtc/django-auth-tutorial-example
This was my first time recording this kind of content, so your feedback is highly appreciated. Please let me know what you think!
And don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel! I will post exclusive Django tutorials there. So stay tuned! :-)
Django comes with a variety of command line utilities that can be either invoked using django-admin.py
or the
convenient manage.py
script. A nice thing about it is that you can also add your own commands. Those management
commands can be very handy when you need to interact with your application via command line using a terminal and it can
also serve as an interface to execute cron jobs. In this tutorial you are going to learn how to code your own commands.
Just before we get started, let’s take a moment to familiarize with Django’s command line interface. You are probably
already familiar with commands like startproject
, runserver
or collectstatic
. To see a complete list of commands
you can run the command below:
Output:
We can create our own commands for our apps and include them in the list by creating a management/commands directory inside an app directory, like below:
The name of the command file will be used to invoke using the command line utility. For example, if our command was
called my_custom_command.py
, then we will be able to execute it via:
Let’s explore next our first example.
Below, a basic example of what the custom command should look like:
management/commands/what_time_is_it.py
Basically a Django management command is composed by a class named Command
which inherits from BaseCommand
. The
command code should be defined inside the handle()
method.
See how we named our module what_time_is_it.py
. This command can be executed as:
Output:
You may be asking yourself, how is that different from a regular Python script, or what’s the benefit of it. Well, the main advantage is that all Django machinery is loaded and ready to be used. That means you can import models, execute queries to the database using Django’s ORM and interact with all your project’s resources.
Django make use of the argparse, which is part of Python’s standard
library. To handle arguments in our custom command we should define a method named add_arguments
.
The next example is a command that create random user instances. It takes a mandatory argument named total
, which
will define the number of users that will be created by the command.
management/commands/create_users.py
Here is how one would use it:
The optional (and named) arguments can be passed in any order. In the example below you will find the definition of an argument named “prefix”, which will be used to compose the username field:
management/commands/create_users.py
Usage:
or
If the prefix is used, the username field will be created as custom_user_oYwoxtt4vNHR
. If not prefix, it will be
created simply as oYwoxtt4vNHR
– a random string.
Another type of optional arguments are flags, which are used to handle boolean values. Let’s say we want to add an
--admin
flag, to instruct our command to create a super user or to create a regular user if the flag is not present.
management/commands/create_users.py
Usage:
Or
Let’s create a new command now named delete_users. In this new command we will be able to pass a list of user ids and the command should delete those users from the database.
management/commands/delete_users.py
Usage:
Output:
We can also pass a number of ids separated by spaces, so the command will delete the users in a single call:
Output:
We could improve the previous example a little big by setting an appropriate color to the output message:
management/commands/delete_users.py
Usage is the same as before, difference now is just the output:
Output:
Below a list of all available styles, in form of a management command:
If you have a task that must run periodically, like generating a report every Monday. Or let’s say you have a Web scrapper that collects data from some Website every 10 minutes. You can define this code as a management command and simply add it to your server’s crontab like this:
The example above will execute the my_custom_command
every day at 4 a.m.
The examples above should be enough to get you started. More advanced usage will boil down to knowing how to use the argparse features. And of course, Django’s official documentation on management commands is the best resource.
You can find all the code used in this tutorial on GitHub.