A Beginner’s Guide to Django’s Built-in Login System

A Beginner’s Guide to Django’s Built-in Login System

Django provides a built-in authentication system that makes it easy to implement user login, logout, and sign-up functionality in your web application. In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through the steps to use Django’s built-in authentication system to create a login, logout, and sign-up functionality in your web app.

Prerequisites

Before we start, you should have a basic understanding of:

• Django web framework
• HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Step 1: Create a Django Project

Create a new Django project by running the following command in your terminal:

django-admin startproject myproject

Step 2: Create a Django App

Create a new app in your Django project by running the following command:

python manage.py startapp accounts

Step 3: Configure URL patterns

In your myproject/urls.py file, include the URL pattern for your accounts app by adding the following code:

from django.urls import include, path

urlpatterns = [
    path('accounts/', include('accounts.urls')),
    # ...
]

Step 4: Create URL patterns for the accounts app

In your accounts/urls.py file, add the following URL patterns:

from django.urls import path
from django.contrib.auth import views as auth_views
from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    path('login/', auth_views.LoginView.as_view(template_name='accounts/login.html'), name='login'),
    path('logout/', auth_views.LogoutView.as_view(), name='logout'),
    path('signup/', views.signup, name='signup'),
]

These patterns will map to the built-in views for login and logout, and a custom view for the sign-up page.

Step 5: Create Login, Logout, and Sign-up Templates

Create three templates for login, logout, and sign-up by adding the following HTML code in the corresponding templates/accounts/ directory:

login.html

{% extends 'base.html' %}

{% block content %}
    <h2>Login</h2>
    <form method="post">
        {% csrf_token %}
        {{ form.as_p }}
        <button type="submit">Log in</button>
    </form>
{% endblock %}

logout.html

{% extends 'base.html' %}

{% block content %}
    <h2>Logged out</h2>
{% endblock %}

signup.html

{% extends 'base.html' %}

{% block content %}
    <h2>Sign up</h2>
    <form method="post">
        {% csrf_token %}
        {{ form.as_p }}
        <button type="submit">Sign up</button>
    </form>
{% endblock %}

Step 6: Create Sign-up View

Create a view for sign-up by adding the following code in the accounts/views.py file:

from django.shortcuts import render, redirect
from django.contrib.auth.forms import UserCreationForm

def signup(request):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = UserCreationForm(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            form.save()
            return redirect('login')
    else:
        form = UserCreationForm()
    return render(request, 'accounts/signup.html', {'form': form})

This view uses the UserCreationForm to create a new user account

Step 7: Add Authentication URLs to Settings

Add the following lines to your myproject/settings.py file:

LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL = '/'
LOGOUT_REDIRECT_URL = '/'

These lines will redirect users to the homepage after login or logout.

Step 8: Include Authentication Forms in Templates

To display the authentication forms in your templates, add the following code to your base.html template:

{% if user.is_authenticated %}
    <a href="{% url 'logout' %}">Log out</a>
{% else %}
    <a href="{% url 'login' %}">Log in</a> /
    <a href="{% url 'signup' %}">Sign up</a>
{% endif %}

This code will display “Log out” if the user is authenticated and “Log in / Sign up” if not.

Step 9: Run Migrations and Start the Server

Run the migrations by running the following command in your terminal:

python manage.py migrate

Then start the server:

python manage.py runserver

You should now be able to navigate to http://localhost:8000/accounts/login/ to see the login page. You can also navigate to http://localhost:8000/accounts/signup/ to see the sign-up page.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we covered the steps to implement a user authentication system using Django’s built-in authentication system. By following these steps, you should now have a working login, logout, and sign-up functionality in your Django web application.

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