Django Signup Tutorial

• Last updated Dec 8, 2022

Previously we added login and logout pages to our Django app. In this tutorial we'll create a sign up page so users can register for a new account.

The Django auth app provided us with built-in url and views for login and logout. All we needed to do was add a template for login. But to create a sign up page we will need to make our own view and url. Let's begin!

Users app

Since we're making our own view and url for registration, we need to create a dedicated app. Let's call it accounts.

(accounts) $ python manage.py startapp accounts

Make sure to add the new app to the INSTALLED_APPS setting in our django_project/settings.py file:

# django_project/settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = [
    "django.contrib.admin",
    "django.contrib.auth",
    "django.contrib.contenttypes",
    "django.contrib.sessions",
    "django.contrib.messages",
    "django.contrib.staticfiles",
    "accounts",  # new
]

Then add a project-level url for the accounts app above our included Django auth app. Django will look top to bottom for url patterns so when it sees a url route within our accounts app that matches one in the built-in auth app, it will choose the accounts route first.

# django_project/urls.py
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include
from django.views.generic.base import TemplateView

urlpatterns = [
    path("admin/", admin.site.urls),
    path("accounts/", include("accounts.urls")),  # new
    path("accounts/", include("django.contrib.auth.urls")),
    path("", TemplateView.as_view(template_name="home.html"), name="home"),
]

Create a new urls file in our accounts app. Note that we are importing a view called SignUp which we'll implement in the next section.

(accounts) $ touch accounts/urls.py

# accounts/urls.py
from django.urls import path

from .views import SignUpView


urlpatterns = [
    path("signup/", SignUpView.as_view(), name="signup"),
]

Now for the views.py file:

# accounts/views.py
from django.contrib.auth.forms import UserCreationForm
from django.urls import reverse_lazy
from django.views import generic


class SignUpView(generic.CreateView):
    form_class = UserCreationForm
    success_url = reverse_lazy("login")
    template_name = "registration/signup.html"

We're subclassing the generic class-based view CreateView in our SignUp class. We specify the use of the built-in UserCreationForm and the not-yet-created template at signup.html. And we use reverse_lazy to redirect the user to the login page upon successful registration.

Why use reverse_lazy instead of reverse I hope you're asking? The reason is that for all generic class-based views the urls are not loaded when the file is imported, so we have to use the lazy form of reverse to load them later when they're available.

Ok final step. Create a new template templates/registration/signup.html and populate it with this code that looks almost exactly like what we used for login.html.

<!-- templates/registration/signup.html -->
{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block title %}Sign Up{% endblock %}

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

And we're done! To confirm it all works, spin up our local server with python manage.py runserver and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000/accounts/signup/.

The extra text with tips on usernames and passwords comes from Django. We can customize that too but it requires a little more work and is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Sign up for a new account and hit the "Sign up" button. You will be redirected to the login page http://127.0.0.1:8000/accounts/login/ where you can log in with your new account.

And then after a successful login you'll be redirect to the homepage with a personalized "Hi username!" greeting.

Next Steps

We've successfully created a new sign up functionality to go alongside our existing login and logout. There's only one thing missing: add the ability for users to reset their passwords. We'll cover this in part 3, Django Password Reset Tutorial.