Django comes with an user authentication system. It handles user accounts, groups, permissions and cookie-based user sessions. This section of the documentation explains how the default implementation works out of the box, as well as how to extend and customize it to suit your project’s needs.
The Django authentication system handles both authentication and authorization. Briefly, authentication verifies a user is who they claim to be, and authorization determines what an authenticated user is allowed to do. Here the term authentication is used to refer to both tasks.
The auth system consists of:
Authentication support is bundled as a Django contrib module in django.contrib.auth. By default, the required configuration is already included in the settings.py generated by django-admin.py startproject, these consist of two items listed in your INSTALLED_APPS setting:
and two items in your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES setting:
With these settings in place, running the command manage.py syncdb creates the necessary database tables for auth related models, creates permissions for any models defined in your installed apps, and prompts you to create a superuser account the first time you run it.
Dec 23, 2012