Using Emails to authenticate

[Frankline]

Hi all,

I guess this question has been asked here a couple of times but I'm going to ask it anyway.

I'm developing a Django application/website and I have a need to use the email for authentication instead of username. I'm more keen to find out how you handle the following:

- The default length of the email field

- Ensuring that the email field remain unique

- Making/Synchronizing the changes with the database

I'm more biased towards handling this myself rather than using the available packages out there.

Does any one have a pointer to a link on how this is handled?

Thanks.

Regards,

F. O. O.

[Victor Rocha]

I haven't heard of a package that does what you need. I will try to help you as much as possible.

I use django-registration to handle user registration. It provides a form named RegistrationFormUniqueEmail, this form, as its name suggests, will ensure that the email used is unique.

For login: implement an authentication backend that makes sure that the password and email match. It should look something like this:

# Overwrite the default backend to check for e-mail address 

class EmailBackend(ModelBackend):

    def authenticate(self, username=None, password=None):

        #If username is an email address, then try to pull it up

        try:

            user = User.objects.get(email__iexact=username)

        except User.DoesNotExist:

            return None

        if user.check_password(password):

            return user

Let me know if you have any questions.