django all-auth case insensitive username

Question

I'm using Django AllAuth and was making a simple profile page for the users of the app. That is reachable by typing in a user's username.

# urls.py
path('<str:username>/', UserDetail.as_view(), name='user-detail'),

# views.py
class UserDetail (DetailView):
    template_name = 'dashboard/user.html'
    model = User

    def get_object(self):
        return get_object_or_404(User, username=self.kwargs['username'])

My thought is that it would work like twitter out of the gate. A user creates an account username like MyUsername which looks nice case-sensitive and is searchable case-insensitive. So if someone searched a user they could type in the username case-insensitive and it would always pull up the right user just with the nicer looking case-sensitive style.

That's when I realized a user with username: MyUsername as supposed to myusername is actually 2 different users. Naive for me to think otherwise I suppose.

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Django AllAuth does have ACCOUNT_PRESERVE_USERNAME_CASING (=True) that I could implement but that would just make it so all usernames are lowercase while I was looking to just make usernames case-insensitive unique while still showing the nicer case-sensitive version.

What would be the best approach to handle make the username case-insensitive unique but still show the case-sensitive format to the users?

Answer 1

I would suggest ACCOUNT_PRESERVE_USERNAME_CASING = False and keep a "displayable" version of username in separate field (set on signup). If a username is changed, both names should be then updated as well (one internal for auth handling, the other for displaying).