[Django]-Django custom User model authentication

The whole Django auth system is tightly coupled with django.contrib.auth.models.User, so you should use it in the backend. Quoting Django docs

For now, the best way to deal with this is to create a Django User object for each user that exists for your backend

But the main question here is: what is so special about your CustomUser that you can’t implement with normal User model (may be extended)? In 99% of cases using User is the best way.

Check out this post.

Most of the Django projects I’ve worked on need to store information about each user in addition to the standard name and email address held by the contrib.auth.models.User model.

If you’re using trunk as of revision 7477 (26th April 2008), your model classes can inherit from an existing model class. Additional fields are stored in a separate table which is linked to the table of the base model. When you retrieve your model, the query uses a join to get the fields from it and the base model.

http://scottbarnham.com/blog/2008/08/21/extending-the-django-user-model-with-inheritance/

And this post.

Copy the auth application over into your own project and modify it to your needs. This avoids some of the maintenance troubles, but removes the utility of Django bundling an auth system in the first place. It can also cause compatibility problems with other applications which expect the User model to be in django.contrib.auth.

http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2006/jun/06/django-tips-extending-user-model/

Perhaps this answers your question:

From ‘https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/topics/auth/customizing/#substituting-a-custom-user-model‘:

Substituting a custom User model
New in Django 1.5.
Some kinds of projects may have authentication requirements for which Django’s built-in User model is not always appropriate. For instance, on some sites it makes more sense to use an email address as your identification token instead of a username.

Django allows you to override the default User model by providing a value for the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting that references a custom model:

AUTH_USER_MODEL = ‘myapp.MyUser’
This dotted pair describes the name of the Django app (which must be in your INSTALLED_APPS), and the name of the Django model that you wish to use as your User model.

Of course there are some requisite warnings to consider (available at the above link), but this is looking like a good answer to your question: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/ref/settings/#auth-user-model

There are also some custom model compliance expectations to consider (too many to list here): https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/topics/auth/customizing/#specifying-a-custom-user-model

Unless there can be more than one value for AUTH_USER_MODEL (I doubt that is sane), then I think I will need to build my own custom authentication backend: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.6/topics/auth/customizing/#writing-an-authentication-backend

I hope this helps any other lost souls out there that need distinct User and Device authentication schemes (perhaps because of some pre-existing spec that makes messy what could be soooo easy).

Cheers!