Whats the best way to extend Anonymous User in Django?

Question

I want to make my User objects all have the same base behaviour and to do so I need to add a couple of methods / properties to Anonymous User.

I've already subclassed User to make richer user objects but I was wondering if anyone has done the same for Anonymous User? And if there are any preferred ways of doing it!

Answer 1

Your middleware suggestion got me thinking, and I now think the best idea is to overwrite the standard AuthenticationMiddleware. That class assigns a LazyUser object to the request, which is resolved to the correct user, when accessed, by calling contrib.auth.get_user. This is probably the right place to override things, so that it calls your customised get_user function which returns your subclassed AnonymousUser.

Answer 2

A simpler and more general (but less safe) solution would be to just replace django.contrib.auth.models.AnonymousUser with your own class:

class YourAnonymousUser(...):
    ...


import django.contrib.auth.models as django_auth_models
django_auth_models.AnonymousUser = YourAnonymousUser

As of 1.10.5, Django lazily imports the anonymous user class, so you won't run into issues with core Django. You also rarely interact with AnonymousUser directly, since you could just use .is_anonymous(), so you should be fine as long as you know how your dependencies use AnonymousUser.