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User registration and authorization on a django API with djoser and JSON web tokens.

Lewis kori on November 14, 2019

Originally published on my website In the first part of the intro django rest framework, we set up the project and did an overview of what the pro...

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fmesteban • Feb 12 '20

Hi! Nice post, was really useful to me. But now I want to expand on this. I have different models that I want to relate to a User of the system (lets say, Student and Teacher), each with different fields. How can I differentiate the registration of these?

Lewis kori • Feb 13 '20 • Edited

hey Fmesteban,
really happy you found this post helpful.

One way you can approach this is by extending the Django AbstractUser model and introducing a field by the name role.

from django.contrib.auth.models import AbstractUser

TEACHER = 'Teacher'
STUDENT = 'Student'

ROLES = [(TEACHER, 'Teacher'), (STUDENT, 'Student'),]

class UserAccount(AbstractUser):
    role = models.CharField(max_length=10,choices=ROLES, default=STUDENT)

From this, you can make different UserProfiles like indicated from the post. For instance:

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

User = get_user_model()

class TeacherProfile(models.Model):
    user=models.OneToOne(User,limit_choices_to={'role':'Teacher'}, on_delete=models.CASCADE,related_name="teacher_profile")
    # your custom fields for teacher model

    def __str__(self):
        return self.user.username

class StudentProfile(models.Model):
    user=models.OneToOne(User,limit_choices_to={'role':'Student'}, on_delete=models.CASCADE,related_name="student_profile")
    # write your custom fields for student profile from here.

    def __str__(self):
        return self.user.username

After that has been set up, you'll just make a post_save signal that listens to the type of role on the new UserAccount instance. If it's a teacher, initialize TeacherProfile instance and populate it.

This can be achieved in a multistep form. Same for the student profile.

fmesteban • Feb 13 '20

Thanks for the quick response! I had about the same idea but wanted to make sure that was the way to go.

Thanks again!

Lewis kori • Feb 13 '20 • Edited

You're welcome :)

Chafik Maouche • Apr 28 '20

sir i want to use this role choice in the login process hwo can i do ti ?

Sagar Giri • Jan 29 '20

How can I use raw json as POST data instead of x-www-form-urlencoded ?

Lewis kori • Jan 30 '20 • Edited

Hey, Sagar, you can use this method on postman;

or if you want to use curl,

in both instances, the user is created as you can see below,

Olaniyi Oshunbote • Jan 23 '20

I got the error NameError: name 'APITestCase' is not defined when I ran python manage.py test. No surprises there as that was not imported or earlier defined. How is this resolved?

Lewis kori • Jan 30 '20 • Edited

Hello Olaniyi,
Are you working on your own implementation of the code?
If so kindly share the GitHub link and we can debug together. Mine is working ok as far as I can tell.
Here's a screenshot of the same.

Here's the code from the tests.py file.

Leandro Galanterni • Apr 27 '20

Hey great posting, I'm trying to achieve the exact same thing you are doing but I'm not sure how to create a new profile. What I want to do is call the POST /auth/users method with additional fields so that it creates the profile and the user at the same time. Is this realistic? Or I need to perform 2 steps (i.e. one call to create the user and a second call to create the profile)
Thanks in advance!

Lewis kori • Apr 27 '20

Lewis kori

Feb 2

Hey. Yes it would.

The best way to add extra fields is to extend django user model with AbstractUser, then place those extra fields in the REQUIRED_FIELDS array.
That way the djoser /auth/users/ endpoints can recognize the additional fields on the CustomUser model.

I had initially made the user profile to demonstrate signals to the readers :)

You can use django's AbstractUser Class to extend the user model. Here's the documentation

Sharon Zeng • Mar 23 '20

Thank you for sharing! It works like a charm!! So helpful!

Lewis kori • Mar 23 '20

Welcome! Glad it helped :)

Ashkan Goleh poor • Mar 15 '20

very useful tutorial , can you put information about reset-password ,activation, ...

Lewis kori • Mar 18 '20

hey, yes I will. Working on a full-stack tutorial with Django and vue.js. it'll be covered there

ailyamas • Jul 15 '22

how to create a logoutView i try blacklist but not work, my refresh token is always still valid

kev26 • Jun 17 '22

Thank you so much !

pedro-lopes97 • May 3 '20

Thank you for this!

Lewis kori • May 3 '20

welcome ;)

Housseyn Belhadja • Jan 7 '20

I cannot find the words to describe what I explained. Thank you very much, I am waiting for what you will offer in the next explanations about DJANGO REST <3