django User registration and authentication by email

Question

I want to make users active by sending them an activation email to click. I guess it is currently not incorporated in Django 1.6.The user-registration app coded in Django seems to serve this purpose. But I have some doubts with regard to the DefaultForm it provides in forms.py. I want to have more fields included in it. How can I achieve that in class RegistrationForm(forms.Form) implemented there. If I install this app, is it a good idea to change include more fields directly there, is there a better way to achieve the same.

In the views.py, I see some methods such as the following are not implemented. I dont have a clear picture of what these methods need to do. should I redirect the url here to the pages?

def register(self, request, **cleaned_data):
 raise NotImplementedError

def activate(self, request, *args, **kwargs):

        raise NotImplementedError

    def get_success_url(self, request, user):
        raise NotImplementedError

Answer 1

You need to first let them sign up and mark them as is_active=False for the time being. Something like this:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.core.mail import send_mail
from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect

def signup(request):
  # form to sign up is valid
  user = User.objects.create_user('username', 'email', 'password')
  user.is_active=False
  user.save()

  # now send them an email with a link in order to activate their user account
  #   you can also use an html django email template to send the email instead
  #   if you want
  send_mail('subject', 'msg [include activation link to View here to activate account]', 'from_email', ['to_email'], fail_silently=False)

 return HttpResponseRedirect('register_success_view')

Then once they click the link in the email it takes them to the next view (note: you need to put a link in the email so that you know which user it is. This may be 16-digit salt or something. The below view uses the user.pk:

def activate_view(request, pk):
  user = User.objects.get(pk=pk)
  user.is_active=True
  user.save()
  return HttpResponseRedirect('activation_success_view')

Hope that helps. Good Luck!

Answer 2

Basically you can use django's user model(https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/ref/contrib/auth/). However, in user model email is not a required field. You need to modify the model to make email an required field.

In your views, you might need the following method:

1) Sign up: after sign up, set user.is_active=False and call function send_email to include an activation link in the email. In the link, you might want to include the user's information (for example, user.id) so when the user click the link, you know which user to activate.

2) send_email: send a link to user's email address for verification. The link includes user's id. For example: http://127.0.0.1:8000/activation/?id=4

3) Activate: get the id information from the URL using id=request.GET.get('id'). Query user=user whose id is id. set user.is_active=True.

Actually I implemented an reusable application like your request, check this(https://github.com/JunyiJ/django-register-activate) if you are interested.

Hope that helps. Good luck!