What does request.user refer to in Django?

Question

I have confusion regarding what does request.user refers to in Django? Does it refer to username field in the auth_user table or does it refer to User model instance?

I had this doubt because I was not able to access email field in the template using {{request.user.username}} or {{user.username}}.

So instead I did following in views file:

userr = User.objects.get(username=request.user) 

And passed userr to the template and accessed email field as {{ userr.email }}.

Although its working but I wanted to have some clarity about it.

Answer 1

request.user is User model object.

You cannot access request object in template if you do not pass request explicitly. If you want access user object from template, you should pass it to template or use RequestContext.