Quick start guide¶

Required settings¶

Begin by adding the following setting to your Django settings file:

ACCOUNT_ACTIVATION_DAYS

This is the number of days users will have to activate their accounts after registering. If a user does not activate within that period, the account will remain permanently inactive unless a site administrator manually activates it.

For example, you might have something like the following in your Django settings file:

ACCOUNT_ACTIVATION_DAYS = 7 # One-week activation window; you may, of course, use a different value.

You’ll also need to have django.contrib.auth in your INSTALLED_APPS setting, since all of the registration workflows in django-registration make use of it.

Setting up URLs¶

Each bundled registration workflow in django-registration includes a Django URLconf which sets up URL patterns for the views in django-registration, as well as several useful views in django.contrib.auth (e.g., login, logout, password change/reset). The URLconf for the HMAC activation workflow can be found at registration.backends.hmac.urls, and so can simply be included in your project’s root URL configuration. For example, to place the URLs under the prefix /accounts/, you could add the following to your project’s root URLconf:

from django.conf.urls import include, url

urlpatterns = [
    # Other URL patterns ...
    url(r'^accounts/', include('registration.backends.hmac.urls')),
    # More URL patterns ...
]

Users would then be able to register by visiting the URL /accounts/register/, log in (once activated) at /accounts/login/, etc.

Another URLConf is also provided – at registration.auth_urls – which just handles the Django auth views, should you want to put those at a different location.

Required templates¶

You will also need to create several templates required by django-registration, and possibly additional templates required by views in django.contrib.auth. The templates required by django-registration are as follows; note that, with the exception of the templates used for account activation emails, all of these are rendered using a RequestContext and so will also receive any additional variables provided by context processors.

registration/registration_form.html

Used to show the form users will fill out to register. By default, has the following context:

form

The registration form. This will likely be a subclass of RegistrationForm; consult Django’s forms documentation for information on how to display this in a template.

registration/registration_complete.html

Used after successful completion of the registration form. This template has no context variables of its own, and should simply inform the user that an email containing account-activation information has been sent.

registration/activate.html

Used if account activation fails. With the default setup, has the following context:

activation_key

The activation key used during the activation attempt.

registration/activation_complete.html

Used after successful account activation. This template has no context variables of its own, and should simply inform the user that their account is now active.

registration/activation_email_subject.txt

Used to generate the subject line of the activation email. Because the subject line of an email must be a single line of text, any output from this template will be forcibly condensed to a single line before being used. This template has the following context:

activation_key

The activation key for the new account.

expiration_days

The number of days remaining during which the account may be activated.

site

An object representing the site on which the user registered; depending on whether django.contrib.sites is installed, this may be an instance of either django.contrib.sites.models.Site (if the sites application is installed) or django.contrib.sites.requests.RequestSite (if not). Consult the documentation for the Django sites framework for details regarding these objects’ interfaces.

registration/activation_email.txt

Used to generate the body of the activation email. Should display a link the user can click to activate the account. This template has the following context:

activation_key

The activation key for the new account.

expiration_days

The number of days remaining during which the account may be activated.

site

An object representing the site on which the user registered; depending on whether django.contrib.sites is installed, this may be an instance of either django.contrib.sites.models.Site (if the sites application is installed) or django.contrib.sites.requests.RequestSite (if not). Consult the documentation for the Django sites framework for details regarding these objects.

Note that the templates used to generate the account activation email use the extension .txt, not .html. Due to widespread antipathy toward and interoperability problems with HTML email, django-registration defaults to plain-text email, and so these templates should simply output plain text rather than HTML.

To make use of the views from django.contrib.auth (which are set up for you by the default URLconf mentioned above), you will also need to create the templates required by those views. Consult the documentation for Django’s authentication system for details regarding these templates.