Source: 📖 Django for Professionals ch5 p76-80

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Handling sign up

In order to handle user sign ups, there are a few steps involved. In no particular order, since they are all required (follow TDD), they are as follows:

Update project-level urls.py to include accounts/urls.py

The built-in auth app has no standard URL path and view for signing users up — this is the part we must do ourselves. The project-level urls.py file should point to accounts/urls.py, where the sign up URL will be handled. To not interfere with the built-in auth URLs, make sure to point to accounts/urls.py after pointing to the built-in auth, as we will share the accounts/ URL routing.

# config/urls.py	# project-level urls.py

from django import urls
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include


urlpatterns = [
	path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
	path('accounts/', include('django.contrib.auth.urls')),
	path('accounts/', include('accounts.urls')),
]

We first route accounts/ to the built in auth app's urls.py file, where all built in URLs will be handled (see Django auth URLs). Since there is no built in sign up URL, this will not be found in auth/urls.py so then we point to accounts/urls.py, where we will manually handle the request.

Create accounts/urls.py

In the accounts app you will need a urls.py file to catch the sign up request.

# accounts/urls.py

from django.contrib import path
from .views import SignUpPageView


urlpatterns = [
	path('signup/', SignUpPageView.as_view(), name='signup'),
]

Here we catch the /accounts/signup/ URL, and we use the class-based SignUpPageView, which we will create next.

Create sign up view

For the view, we will inherit from Django's generic.CreateView class. The generic views are commonly used views, such as creation forms, packaged into a class that we can inherit from for convenience.

# accounts/views.py

from django.urls import reverse_lazy
from django.views import generic
from .forms import CustomUserCreationForm


class SignUpPageView(generic.CreateView):
	form_class = CustomUserCreationForm
	success_url = reverse_lazy('login')
	template_name = 'registration/signup.html'

We define three attributes inside our class view. form_class informs the view as to which form to base the form fields on — we feed it CustomUserCreationForm (see Creating custom user forms). success_url tells the view where to go when a user successfully completes the sign up form — we use reverse_lazy to get the URL of the page named login (one of the auth app's built-ins). Finally, template_name tells the view which template to use.

Create sign up template

We must also create a sign up template for our view class to use. This is simple to do, just create a new template and extend your base.html, then create a form that references {{ form }}, as this is the context name given to the form used by the class view.

...

<form method="POST">
	{% csrf_token %}
	{{ form.as_p }}
	<button type="submit">Sign Up</button>
</form>

...

All errors will be conveniently handled for us. The final step is to link to the sign up page's URL from another page.