django user model and custom primary key field

Question

Django by default makes a primary key field on each model named " id ", with a type of AutoField . On my models, I'm overriding this to use a custom UUIDField as the primary key by using the " primary_key " attribute. I would also like the User model in django.contrib.auth to have a UUIDField as the primary key, but this doesn't seem to be possible without changing the User model source code.

Is there any recommended way to approach this problem?

Answer 1

With the release of Django 1.5, the authentication backend now supports custom user models:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/customizing/#substituting-a-custom-user-model

An email field can be used as the username field and the primary_key argument can be set on it:

class CustomUser(AbstractBaseUser, PermissionsMixin):
    email = models.EmailField(max_length=254, unique=True, db_index=True, primary_key=True)

    USERNAME_FIELD = 'email'

Answer 2

this doesn't seem to be possible without changing the User model source code.

Correct. Unless you are willing to change (or replace) User there isn't a way.

One (tenuous, hackish) way to do this would be to attach an UserProfile for each User instance. Each User should have exactly one UserProfile . You can then add your UUIDField to the profile. You will still have to do custom querying to translate from UUIDField to id .

If you don't like the name UserProfile you can rename it suitably. The key is that you have a one-to-one relationship to User .

Answer 3

One could leverage just the AbstractUser and make the following changes

class CustomUser(AbstractUser):
    email = models.EmailField(max_length=254, unique=True, db_index=True, primary_key=True)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)

    USERNAME_FIELD = 'email'
    REQUIRED_FILEDS = ['name']