Quick start guide¶
First you’ll need to have Django and django-registration installed; for details on that, see the installation guide.
The next steps will depend on which registration workflow you’d like to use. There are two workflows built into django-registration:
The two-step activation workflow, which implements a two-step process: a user signs up, then is emailed an activation link and must click it to activate the account.
The one-step workflow, in which a user signs up and their account is immediately active and logged in.
If you want a signup process other than what’s provided by these built-in workflows, please see the documentation for the base view and form classes, which you can subclass to implement your own preferred user registration flow and rules. The guide below covers use of the built-in workflows.
Regardless of which registration workflow you choose to use, you should add
“django_registration” to your INSTALLED_APPS
setting.
Important
Django’s authentication system must be installed
Before proceeding with either of the recommended built-in workflows, you’ll
need to ensure django.contrib.auth
has been installed (by adding it to
INSTALLED_APPS
and running manage.py
migrate
to install needed database tables). Also, if you’re making use of
a custom user model,
you’ll probably want to pause and read the custom user compatibility
guide before using django-registration.
Note
Additional steps for account security
While django-registration does what it can to secure the user signup process, its scope is deliberately limited; please read the security documentation for recommendations on steps to secure user accounts beyond what django-registration alone can do.
Configuring the two-step activation workflow¶
The configuration process for using the two-step activation workflow is straightforward: you’ll need to specify a couple of settings, connect some URLs and create a few templates.
Required settings¶
Begin by adding the following setting to your Django settings file:
ACCOUNT_ACTIVATION_DAYS
This is the number ofdays users will have to activate their accounts after registering. If a user does not activate within that period, the account will remain permanently inactive unless a site administrator manually activates it.
For example, you might have something like the following in your Django settings:
ACCOUNT_ACTIVATION_DAYS = 7 # One-week activation window
Setting up URLs¶
Each bundled registration workflow in django-registration includes a Django
URLconf which sets up URL patterns for the views in django-registration. The URLconf for the two-step activation workflow can be found at
django_registration.backends.activation.urls
. For example, to place the
registration URLs under the prefix /accounts/
, you could add the following
to your project’s root URLconf:
from django.urls import include, path
urlpatterns = [
# Other URL patterns ...
path('accounts/', include('django_registration.backends.activation.urls')),
path('accounts/', include('django.contrib.auth.urls')),
# More URL patterns ...
]
Users would then be able to register by visiting the URL
/accounts/register/
, log in (once activated) at /accounts/login/
, etc.
The sample URL configuration above also sets up the built-in auth views
included in Django (login, logout, password reset, etc.) via the
django.contrib.auth.urls
URLconf.
The following URL names are defined by
django_registration.backends.activation.urls
:
django_registration_register
is the account-registration view.django_registration_complete
is the post-registration success message.django_registration_activate
is the account-activation view.django_registration_activation_complete
is the post-activation success message.django_registration_disallowed
is a message indicating registration is not currently permitted.
Required templates¶
You will also need to create several templates required by django-registration,
and possibly additional templates required by views in
django.contrib.auth
. The templates required by django-registration are as
follows; note that, with the exception of the templates used for account
activation emails, all of these are rendered using a
RequestContext
and so will also receive any
additional variables provided by context processors.
django_registration/registration_form.html
¶
Used to show the form users will fill out to register. By default, has the following context:
form
The registration form. This will likely be a subclass of
RegistrationForm
; consult Django’s forms documentation for information on how to display this in a template.
django_registration/registration_complete.html
¶
Used after successful completion of the registration form. This template has no context variables of its own, and should inform the user that an email containing account-activation information has been sent.
django_registration/registration_closed.html
¶
Used when registration of new user accounts is disabled. This template has no context variables of its own.
django_registration/activation_failed.html
¶
Used if account activation fails. Has the following context:
activation_error
A
dict
containing the information supplied to theActivationError
which occurred during activation. See the documentation for that exception for a description of the keys, and the documentation forActivationView
for the specific values used in different failure situations.
django_registration/activation_complete.html
¶
Used after successful account activation. This template has no context variables of its own, and should inform the user that their account is now active.
django_registration/activation_email_subject.txt
¶
Used to generate the subject line of the activation email. Because the subject line of an email must be a single line of text, any output from this template will be forcibly condensed to a single line before being used. This template has the following context:
activation_key
The activation key for the new account, as a string.
expiration_days
The number of days remaining during which the account may be activated, as an integer.
request
The
HttpRequest
object representing the request in which the user registered.scheme
The protocol scheme used during registration, as a string; will be either
'http'
or'https'
.site
An object representing the site on which the user registered; depending on whether
django.contrib.sites
is installed, this may be an instance of eitherdjango.contrib.sites.models.Site
(if the sites application is installed) ordjango.contrib.sites.requests.RequestSite
(if not). Consult the documentation for the Django sites framework for details regarding these objects’ interfaces.user
The newly-created user object.
django_registration/activation_email_body.txt
¶
Used to generate the body of the activation email. Should display a link the user can click to activate the account. This template has the following context:
activation_key
The activation key for the new account, as a string.
expiration_days
The number of days remaining during which the account may be activated, as an integer.
request
The
HttpRequest
object representing the request in which the user registered.scheme
The protocol scheme used during registration, as a string; will be either ‘http’ or ‘https’.
site
An object representing the site on which the user registered; depending on whether django.contrib.sites is installed, this may be an instance of either
django.contrib.sites.models.Site
(if the sites application is installed) ordjango.contrib.sites.requests.RequestSite
(if not). Consult the documentation for the Django sites framework for details regarding these objects.user
The newly-created user object.
Note that the templates used to generate the account activation email use the
extension .txt
, not .html
. Due to widespread antipathy toward and
interoperability problems with HTML email, django-registration produces
plain-text email, and so these templates should output plain text rather than
HTML.
To make use of the views from django.contrib.auth
(which are set up for you
by the example URL configuration above), you will also need to create the
templates required by those views. Consult the documentation for Django’s
authentication system
for details regarding these templates.
Configuring the one-step workflow¶
Also included is a one-step registration workflow, where a user signs up and their account is immediately active and logged in.
You will need to configure URLs to use the one-step workflow; the easiest way
is to include()
the URLconf
django_registration.backends.one_step.urls somewhere in your URL
configuration. For example, to place the URLs under the prefix /accounts/ in
your URL structure:
from django.urls import include, path
urlpatterns = [
# Other URL patterns ...
path('accounts/', include('django_registration.backends.one_step.urls')),
path('accounts/', include('django.contrib.auth.urls')),
# More URL patterns ...
]
Users could then register accounts by visiting the URL /accounts/register/
.
The following URL names are defined by
django_registration.backends.one_step.urls
:
django_registration_register
is the account-registration view.django_registration_complete
is the post-registration success message.django_registration_disallowed
is a message indicating registration is not currently permitted.
This URLconf will also configure the appropriate URLs for the rest of the built-in django.contrib.auth views (log in, log out, password reset, etc.).
Finally, you will need to create following templates:
django_registration/registration_form.html
django_registration/registration_complete.html
django_registration/registration_closed.html
See the documentation above for details of these templates.
To make use of the views from django.contrib.auth
(which are set up for you
by the example URL configuration above), you will also need to create the
templates required by those views. Consult the documentation for Django’s
authentication system
for details regarding these templates.