Django Testing - authenticate() returns None

Question

Working on making some unittests with Django, and trying to make some testing with the login process with the login form.

I am using modified User model just to make the email field unique; otherwise nothing drastically different.

account/views.py

def post(self, request):
    # Retrieve the username and password
    username = request.POST['username']
    password = request.POST['password']

    # Create a user object from authentication, or return None
    user = authenticate(username=username, password=password)

    # Check if user was created
    if user is not None:
        # Rest of the code, irrelevant...

account/test_views.py

from account.models import User as CustomUser    

# Code snippit

def test_account_login_POST_successful_login(self):
    # Create a user to test login
    CustomUser.objects.create_user(
        username='test_user',
        email='test_user@intranet.com',
        password='flibble'
    )

    response = self.client.post(self.login_url, {
        'username': 'test_user',
        'password': 'flibble'
    })

    self.assertEqual(response.status_code, 301)

account/models.py

class User(AbstractUser):
    # Make the email field unique
    email = models.EmailField(unique=True)

project/settings.py

# Authentication
AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'account.User'

Funny thing is that login works normally on the web app, but when testing it always returns None .

I've tried to check_password() with the created user, and it returns true in both the test method and the view method.

I've also tried putting in AUTHENTICATION_BACKEND = ['django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend'] , but no go.

Answer 1

I faced with the same problem. The problem was in is_active model field. In my case this field was False by default, so authenticate() returns None all the time.