Django custom user model in admin, relation "auth_user" does not exist

Question

I have a custom user model as below:

class User(AbstractUser):
    subscribe_newsletters = models.BooleanField(default=True)
    old_id = models.IntegerField(null=True, blank=True)
    old_source = models.CharField(max_length=25, null=True, blank=True)

And using the builtin UserAdmin

admin.site.register(User, UserAdmin)

While editing the user record works fine, but when I add a user, I get the following error

Exception Value: 
relation "auth_user" does not exist
LINE 1: ...user"."is_active", "auth_user"."date_joined" FROM "auth_user...

Tim Sylvester · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-05 21:11:51Z

28

After some digging around I found this

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/topics/auth/customizing/#custom-users-and-the-built-in-auth-forms

The culprit is a function clean_username inside UserCreationForm inside django.contrib.auth.forms.py. A few tickets have been created, but apparently the maintainers don't think it's a defect:

https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/20188

https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/20086

def clean_username(self):
        # Since User.username is unique, this check is redundant,
        # but it sets a nicer error message than the ORM. See #13147.
        username = self.cleaned_data["username"]
        try:
            User._default_manager.get(username=username)
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return username
        raise forms.ValidationError(self.error_messages['duplicate_username'])

The User in this file is directly referencing to the builtin user model.

To fix it, I created my custom forms

from models import User #you can use get_user_model
from django.contrib.auth.forms import UserCreationForm
from django.contrib.auth.admin import UserAdmin
from django.contrib.auth import forms

class MyUserCreationForm(UserCreationForm):
    def clean_username(self):
        # Since User.username is unique, this check is redundant,
        # but it sets a nicer error message than the ORM. See #13147.
        username = self.cleaned_data["username"]
        try:
            User._default_manager.get(username=username)
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return username
        raise forms.ValidationError(self.error_messages['duplicate_username'])

    class Meta(UserCreationForm.Meta):
        model = User

class MyUserAdmin(UserAdmin):  
    add_form = MyUserCreationForm   

admin.site.register(User,MyUserAdmin)

Or you can try monkey patching the original UserCreationForm to replace the User variable.

edited Jan 5, 2016 at 21:11

Tim Sylvester

23.2k2 gold badges82 silver badges99 bronze badges

answered Jun 6, 2013 at 3:35

James Lin

26.8k39 gold badges144 silver badges251 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

4 Comments

dustinfarris Over a year ago

Nice catch. This should definitely be addressed considering the Django docs actually encourage you to to use these classes right out of the box when you extend the User model.

Charlesliam Over a year ago

Just the solution I'm looking for.

Ludo Over a year ago

Thanks! Just one small thing, your code example is missing an import: from django.contrib.auth import forms

Gavriel Cohen Over a year ago

The first link you bring is broken

Risadinha · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-01 11:12:19Z

12

Django 1.8

If your app is not yet using migrations then this could also be the problem, as contrib.auth uses them. Enabling migrations for my app solved it for me.

$ ./manage.py makemigrations <my_app>
$ ./manage.py migrate

answered Jul 1, 2015 at 11:12

Risadinha

16.8k2 gold badges97 silver badges99 bronze badges

2 Comments

Nelo Mitranim Over a year ago

You saved my sanity. Apparently if you wipe migrations, you need to keep the migration folder and __init__.py in it, otherwise Django will fail to create the initial migration, and subsequently fail migrate.

Gonçalo Peres Over a year ago

Had to specify the name of the app. Without it I was getting No changes detected.

Benyamin Jafari · Accepted Answer · 2020-07-18 12:57:58Z

5

This is due to migration is not run. This issue is resolved for me by running following command:

python manage.py syncdb

edited Jul 18, 2020 at 12:57

Benyamin Jafari

35.8k35 gold badges161 silver badges184 bronze badges

answered Apr 14, 2015 at 22:02

Sanjay Amin

4312 gold badges5 silver badges14 bronze badges

1 Comment

Benyamin Jafari Over a year ago

this command is deprecated from django 1.9 and later

Lynoure · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-07 16:05:07Z

3

Migrate your app (the one with custom user model) first, and only then the rest:

$ ./manage.py makemigrations <your_app>
$ ./manage.py migrate
$ ./manage.py makemigrations
$ ./manage.py migrate

You can also control the order of migrations to make sure this happens automatically, see https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/howto/writing-migrations/#controlling-the-order-of-migrations

answered Apr 7, 2017 at 16:05

Lynoure

1291 silver badge13 bronze badges

Comments

Arthur Tarasov · Accepted Answer · 2019-06-09 03:24:23Z

0

I had to:

delete the database
create a new database
delete all migrations from all models
make migrations anew
migrate

It was double annoying because I had to do it on local and remote server. I tried just deleting migrations or deleting the database but then git would push/pull the old migrations and messed everything up.

P.S. This bug initially arose because I ran the migrations before adding AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'customauth.MyUser' to the settings.py file, which is not version controlled.

answered Jun 9, 2019 at 3:24

Arthur Tarasov

3,8399 gold badges52 silver badges61 bronze badges

Comments

barna · Accepted Answer · 2021-07-18 09:09:56Z

0

You haven't created the admin in the database. If you are using an up to date version of Django

Try:

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate

Am a bit curious about how you can have a login and password if the auth tables don't exist?

The last command saved me a lot of time

answered Jul 18, 2021 at 9:09

barna

1717 bronze badges

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Django custom user model in admin, relation "auth_user" does not exist

6 Answers 6

4 Comments

2 Comments

1 Comment

Comments

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

6 Answers 6

4 Comments

2 Comments

1 Comment

Comments

Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related