How to automate createsuperuser on django?

Question

If you reference User directly, your code will not work in projects where the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting has been changed to a different user model. A more generic way to create the user would be:

echo "from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model; User = get_user_model(); User.objects.create_superuser('admin', '[email protected]', 'password')" | python manage.py shell

ORIGINAL ANSWER

Here there is a simple version of the script to create a superuser:

echo "from django.contrib.auth.models import User; User.objects.create_superuser('admin', '[email protected]', 'pass')" | python manage.py shell

As of Django 3.0 you can use default createsuperuser --noinput command and set all required fields (including password) as environment variables DJANGO_SUPERUSER_PASSWORD, DJANGO_SUPERUSER_USERNAME, DJANGO_SUPERUSER_EMAIL for example. --noinput flag is required.

This comes from the original docs: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/ref/django-admin/#django-admin-createsuperuser

It is the most convenient way to add createsuperuser to scripts and pipelines.

I was searching for an answer to this myself. I decided to create a Django command which extends the base createsuperuser command (GitHub):

from django.contrib.auth.management.commands import createsuperuser
from django.core.management import CommandError


class Command(createsuperuser.Command):
    help = 'Crate a superuser, and allow password to be provided'

    def add_arguments(self, parser):
        super(Command, self).add_arguments(parser)
        parser.add_argument(
            '--password', dest='password', default=None,
            help='Specifies the password for the superuser.',
        )

    def handle(self, *args, **options):
        password = options.get('password')
        username = options.get('username')
        database = options.get('database')

        if password and not username:
            raise CommandError("--username is required if specifying --password")

        super(Command, self).handle(*args, **options)

        if password:
            user = self.UserModel._default_manager.db_manager(database).get(username=username)
            user.set_password(password)
            user.save()

Example use:

./manage.py createsuperuser2 --username test1 --password 123321 --noinput --email '[email protected]'

This has the advantage of still supporting the default command use, while also allowing non-interactive use for specifying a password.

I use './manage.py shell -c':

./manage.py shell -c "from django.contrib.auth.models import User; User.objects.create_superuser('admin', '[email protected]', 'adminpass')"

This doesn't uses an extra echo, this has the benefit that you can pass it to a docker container for execution. Without the need to use sh -c "..." which gets you into quote escaping hell.

And remember that first comes username, then the email.

If you have a custom user model you need to import that and not auth.models.User

I would suggest running a Data Migration, so when migrations are applied to the project, a superuser is created as part of the migrations. The username and password can be setup as environment variables. This is also useful when running an app in a container (see this thread as an example)

Your data migration would then look like this:

import os
from django.db import migrations

class Migration(migrations.Migration):
    dependencies = [
        ('<your_app>', '<previous_migration>'),
    ] # can also be emtpy if it's your first migration

    def generate_superuser(apps, schema_editor):
        from django.contrib.auth.models import User

        DJANGO_SU_NAME = os.environ.get('DJANGO_SU_NAME')
        DJANGO_SU_EMAIL = os.environ.get('DJANGO_SU_EMAIL')
        DJANGO_SU_PASSWORD = os.environ.get('DJANGO_SU_PASSWORD')

        superuser = User.objects.create_superuser(
            username=DJANGO_SU_NAME,
            email=DJANGO_SU_EMAIL,
            password=DJANGO_SU_PASSWORD)

        superuser.save()

    operations = [
        migrations.RunPython(generate_superuser),
    ]

Hope that helps!

EDIT: Some might raise the question how to set these environment variables and make Django aware of them. There are a lot of ways and it's been answered in other SO posts, but just as a quick pointer, creating a .env file is a good idea. You could then use the python-dotenv package, but if you have setup a virtual environment with pipenv, it will automatically set the envvars in your .env file. Likewise, running your app via docker-compose can read in your .env file.