Custom pipeline or extend user model

[lucienbaumann]

Hi,

I am implementing social-app-django with django 1.11 (not using Mongo). My application will need to store and manipulate a lot of data on users other than that which is fetched from their social media accounts at login. I don't need to fetch or collect any extra data when the user authenticates, but various actions they perform on my site will need to be saved to their user. I am wondering which of the following approaches is preferred (I've searched extensively online, but can't find a specific explanation of the differences):

• Create my own user model in my app's models.py (call itMyUser) that doesn't extend anything special, and then add a function in the authentication pipeline that associates the social-app-django user with a corresponding instance of MyUser. or...

• Create my own user model in my app's models.py, and in the project's settings.py set AUTH_USER_MODEL and SOCIAL_AUTH_USER_MODEL to point to MyUser. In this case, I was wondering whether someone could clarify what MyUser and its manager should extend, and what I need to import in modules.py (I am confused because a lot of stack overflow posts are referring to deprecated versions of this module and I keep getting errors). Also, in this case should I be setting both AUTH_USER_MODEL and SOCIAL_AUTH_USER_MODEL, or just one of them?

Do these two methods essentially achieve the same thing? Is one more reliable/preferred for some reason? Or, should I be doing both? Thanks very much for any assistance.

Oh, and one more thing--I would like to be able to access the User database not only from the app I am currently building, but also from other apps (within the same Django project) that I will build in the future. Does this affect anything?

[h1nk]

I agree there really needs to be some clarification about the use of the SOCIAL_AUTH_USER_MODEL setting. I'm confused as to where and how the value of SOCIAL_AUTH_USER_MODEL is even used in the library and also how it differs from Django's own AUTH_USER_MODEL setting. There's little said in the documentation about how to actually use SOCIAL_AUTH_USER_MODEL with a custom model besides saying that it requires the username and email model fields to be present. I made a custom Django Social Auth user model and set SOCIAL_AUTH_USER_MODEL to it but whenever I'm logged into Django admin I get a conflict:

ValueError: Cannot query "<staff superuser name>": Must be "<SOCIAL_AUTH_USER_MODEL model class>" instance.

Perhaps the python-social-auth/social-examples repository can add a full example in which SOCIAL_AUTH_USER_MODEL is used to point to a separate model than AUTH_USER_MODEL.

[h1nk]

If it's possible I'd ideally like keep complete separation between Django staff/Django Users and Django Social Auth users that I integrate into my custom model, but allow simultaneous login to Django Admin and Django Social Auth. So basically 2 entirely separate authentication systems.

[raghav-kukreti]

Hello, any updates on this?

[08-zimmad]

hey, I am getting the same issue, there's too much on the plate to understand in order to configure drf-social-oauth2 with my Custom auth model. I am using User model too for saperate purposes. any one who knows how to deal with this situation let me know.