Source: 📖 Django for Professionals ch3 p43

Creating a custom Django user model

To create a custom user model, it is a good idea to start by creating a designated accounts app with python manage.py startapp accounts. If using Docker, you can start this app within your container with docker-compose exec {service_name} python manage.py startapp accounts. Assuming you have a volume set up, the change will sync to your local computer.

Next go to the models.py file in the new app, and create a CustomUser class that inherits from Django's built-in AbstractUser or AbstractBaseUser (the latter affords more granular control over your custom user model, but is also trickier to implement).

# accounts/models.py

from django.contrib.auth.models import AbstractUser
from django.db import models


class CustomUser(AbstractUser):
	pass

New fields can be defined inside the class, but in this instance we just inherit the existing fields form AbstractUser.

Next we tell settings.py about our custom user model by adding accounts to INSTALLED_APPS and creating a AUTH_USER_MODEL constant which points to our new model.

# settings.py

...

INSTALLED_APPS = [
	...
	`accounts`,
]

...

AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'accounts.CustomUser'

Finally we can run makemigrations accounts and migrate (within Docker).

The next step is Creating custom user forms