David Cramer's Blog

Logging in With Email Addresses in Django

One of the tasks that seems to come up every single project we do, is changing the auth backend to accept email addresses. Since it’s such a common task for us, it can’t be that rare to want this functionality. So, here’s a quick and simply backend which accomplishes this, using the built-in django.contrib.auth module.

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from django.conf import settings
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class EmailOrUsernameModelBackend(object):
    def authenticate(self, username=None, password=None):
        if '@' in username:
            kwargs = {'email': username}
        else:
            kwargs = {'username': username}
        try:
            user = User.objects.get(**kwargs)
            if user.check_password(password):
                return user
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return None

    def get_user(self, user_id):
        try:
            return User.objects.get(pk=user_id)
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return None
Then in your settings: 
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AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
    'myproject.accounts.backends.EmailOrUsernameModelBackend',
    'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend'
)