1. Getting Started¶

In this tutorial we will get aquainted with how to use bpauth. bpauth provides many utilities to use to manage authentication and user data. Reading the source can be a bit daunting so we’ll go through the most basic usage here.

First we will start by creating a Django application named “account”.

$ python manage.py startapp account

Within the account application we will create the user model for our site. On this model we can add whatever fields might be useful to our application. The User class will extend from bpauth’s UserBase base model class.

Lets edit the models.py:

from django.db import models
from newauth.api import UserBase

class MyUser(UserBase):
    email = models.EmailField('Email Address')
    profile = models.TextField('Profile Bio', blank=True, null=True)
    avatar = models.ImageField('Avatar', upload_to='profileimg/', blank=True, null=True)

Here we have a basic user class for our application. All of the fields we want can be attached directly on the user object. Next we’ll want to make an anonymous user class that has the same fields as our user class:

from django.db import models
from newauth.api import AnonymousUserBase

class MyAnonymousUser(AnonymousUserBase):
    email = None
    profile = None
    avatar = None

Now let’s write a simple view.

from django.views.generic.simple import direct_to_template

from account.models import User

def my_profile(request):
    return direct_to_template(request, 'account/my_profile.html', {
        'avatar': request.auth_user.avatar,
        'profile': request.auth_user.profile,
    })

You see here we can access all of the fields pertaining to the user’s profile directly on the user object. This is very convenient as you do not have to use ‘get_profile()’ to get access to added fields for your user as you have to do with Django’s contrib.auth application.

The UserBase model defines a number of methods on it to allow third party applications to interact with your model. Because third party applications cannot assume you have any fields on your model besides the ‘pk’ field, third party applications need to interact with your MyUser model via these overridable methods.

Here we override the get_display_name() method to use the first part of the user’s email address as their display name. By default the UserBase class simply returns the user’s primary key.

class MyUser(UserBase):

    # ...

    def get_display_name(self):
        return self.email.split('@')[0]

The UserBase class also defines a get_real_name() method that can be used for internal, editing, and administrative functions where a real name would be more appropriate, such as invoicing etc.

In the next section we’ll discuss how to use newauth to create user models that use simple username/password authentication.