Source: 📖 Test Driven Development with Python ch18 p317

Creating a custom user model

To override Django's default user model, first create a new User class in the usual way — by inheriting from models.Model — and specify the fields we want.

# my_app/models.py
from django.db import models


class User(models.Model):
	email = models.EmailField(unique=True)
	
	REQUIRED_FIELDS = []
	USERNAME_FIELD = 'email'
	is_anonymous = False
	is_authenticated = True
	

Here we created a new model that only requires an email field, and gave Django the required metadata about which field to use as the username (the only field we're specifying in this case, this is why unique=True is set) as well as what's required (username field is required by default). The last two attributes are more required Django boilerplate for user models.

To use this as our user model, we tell settings.py about it by specifying AUTH_USER_MODEL. You should also make sure that the app in which the model exists is included in INSTALLED_APPS:

# settings.py
...

INSTALLED_APPS = [
	'django.contrib.admin',
	...
	'my_app',
]

AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'my_app.User'