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...

score 28 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 05 '16 at 21:11

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.

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. — dustinfarris, Oct 02 '13 at 14:13
Thanks! Just one small thing, your code example is missing an import: from django.contrib.auth import forms — Ludo, Jan 31 '14 at 10:58

score 12 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 01 '15 at 11:12

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 01 '15 at 11:12

Risadinha

16,058
2
88
91

1

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`. – Nelo Mitranim Aug 05 '15 at 15:42
Had to specify the name of the app. Without it I was getting `No changes detected`. – Gonçalo Peres Oct 20 '22 at 20:33

score 5 · Answer 3 · edited Jul 18 '20 at 12:57

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 '20 at 12:57

Benyamin Jafari

27,880
26
135
150

answered Apr 14 '15 at 22:02

Sanjay Amin

341
1
4
13

[this command is deprecated from django 1.9 and later](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28685931/unknown-command-syncdb-running-python-manage-py-syncdb) – Benyamin Jafari Jul 18 '20 at 12:57

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 07 '17 at 16:05

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

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 09 '19 at 03:24

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.

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Jul 18 '21 at 09:09

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

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

6 Answers6

Linked