Django Login and Logout Tutorial | LearnDjango.
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Django Login and Logout Tutorial
Last updated Dec 8, 2022
In this tutorial we'll learn how to configure login/logout functionality with Django's the built-in user authentication system. This is the
first in a three-part series that also covers signup and password reset for a complete user authentication flow in your future Django
projects.
This tutorial assumes you're already familiar with how to configure a new Django project. If you need help, please refer to Django for
Beginners which covers the topic in more detail.
Setup
Start by creating a new Django project. This code can live anywhere on your computer. On a Mac, the desktop is a convenient place
and that's where we'll put this code. We can do all of the normal configuration from the command line:
create a new django_auth directory for our code on the Desktop
create a new virtual environment called .venv and activate it
install Django
create a new Django project called django_project
create a new Sqlite database with migrate
run the local server
Here are the commands to run:
# Windows
> cd onedrive\desktop\
> mkdir django_auth
> cd django_auth
> python -m venv .venv
> .venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
(.venv) > python -m pip install django~=4.0.0
(.venv) > django-admin startproject django_project .
(.venv) > python manage.py migrate
(.venv) > python manage.py runserver
# macOS
% cd ~/desktop/
% mkdir django_auth
% cd django_auth
% python3 -m venv .venv
% source .venv/bin/activate
(.venv) % python3 -m pip install django~=4.0.0
(.venv) % django-admin startproject django_project .
(.venv) % python manage.py migrate
(.venv) % python manage.py runserver
If you navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000 you'll see the Django welcome screen.
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§TheinstallworkedsuccessfullyX
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django ViewreleasenotesforDiango4.0
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settingsfileandyouhavenotconfiguredanyURLs.
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Topics,references,&how-to's GetstartedwithDianao Connect,gethelp,orcontribute
The Django auth app
Django automatically installs the auth app when a new project is created. Look in the django_project/settings.py file under
INSTALLED_APPS and you can see auth is one of several built-in apps Django has installed for us.
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# django_project/settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = [
"django.contrib.admin",
"django.contrib.auth", # Yoohoo!!!!
"django.contrib.contenttypes",
"django.contrib.sessions",
"django.contrib.messages",
"django.contrib.staticfiles",
]
To use the auth app we need to add it to our project-level urls.py file. Make sure to add include on the second line. I've chosen to
include the auth app at accounts/ but you can use any url pattern you want.
# django_project/urls.py
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include # new
urlpatterns = [
path("admin/", admin.site.urls),
path("accounts/", include("django.contrib.auth.urls")), # new
]
The auth app we've now included provides us with several authentication views and URLs for handling login, logout, and password
management.
The URLs provided by auth are:
accounts/login/ [name='login']
accounts/logout/ [name='logout']
accounts/password_change/ [name='password_change']
accounts/password_change/done/ [name='password_change_done']
accounts/password_reset/ [name='password_reset']
accounts/password_reset/done/ [name='password_reset_done']
accounts/reset/<uidb64>/<token>/ [name='password_reset_confirm']
accounts/reset/done/ [name='password_reset_complete']
There are associated auth views for each URL pattern, too. That means we only need to create a template to use each!
Login Page
Let's make our login page! Django by default will look within a templates folder called registration for auth templates. The login
template is called login.html.
Create a new directory called templates and within it another directory called registration.
(.venv) > mkdir templates
(.venv) > mkdir templates/registration
Then create a templates/registration/login.html file with your text editor and include the following code:
<!-- templates/registration/login.html -->
<h2>Log In</h2>
<form method="post">
{% csrf_token %}
{{ form.as_p }}
<button type="submit">Log In</button>
</form>
This is a standard Django form using POST to send data and {% csrf_token %} tags for security concerns, namely to prevent a CSRF
Attack. The form's contents are outputted between paragraph tags thanks to {{ form.as_p }} and then we add a "submit" button.
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Next update the settings.py file to tell Django to look for a templates folder at the project level. Update the DIRS setting within
TEMPLATES as follows. This is a one-line change.
# django_project/settings.py
TEMPLATES = [
{
...
'DIRS': [BASE_DIR / "templates"],
...
},
]
Our login functionality now works but to make it better we should specify where to redirect the user upon a successful login. In other
words, once a user has logged in, where should they be sent on the site? We use the LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL setting to specify this
route. At the bottom of the settings.py file add the following to redirect the user to the homepage.
# django_project/settings.py
LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL = "/"
We're actually done at this point! If you now start up the Django server again with python manage.py runserver and navigate to our
login page at http://127.0.0.1:8000/accounts/login/ you'll see the following.
Create users
But there's one missing piece: we haven't created any users yet. Let's quickly do that by making a superuser account from the
command line. Quit the server with Control+c and then run the command python manage.py createsuperuser. Answer the prompts
and note that your password will not appear on the screen when typing for security reasons.
(.venv) > python manage.py createsuperuser
Username (leave blank to use 'wsv'):
Email address:
[email protected] Password:
Password (again):
Superuser created successfully.
Now spin up the server again with python manage.py runserver and refresh the page at http://127.0.0.1:8000/accounts/login/.
Enter the login info for your just-created user.
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We know that our login worked because we were redirected to the homepage, but we haven't created it yet so we see the error Page
not found. Let's fix that!
Create a homepage
We want a simple homepage that will display one message to logged out users and another to logged in users. Create two new files
with your text editor: templates/base.html and templates/home.html. Note that these are located within the templates folder but
not within templates/registration/ where Django auth looks by default for user auth templates.
(.venv) $ touch templates/base.html
(.venv) $ touch templates/home.html
Add the following code to each:
<!-- templates/base.html -->
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>{% block title %}Django Auth Tutorial{% endblock %}</title>
</head>
<body>
<main>
{% block content %}
{% endblock %}
</main>
</body>
</html>
<!-- templates/home.html -->
{% extends 'base.html' %}
{% block title %}Home{% endblock %}
{% block content %}
{% if user.is_authenticated %}
Hi {{ user.username }}!
{% else %}
<p>You are not logged in</p>
<a href="{% url 'login' %}">Log In</a>
{% endif %}
{% endblock %}
While we're at it, we can update login.html too to extend our new base.html file:
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<!-- templates/registration/login.html -->
{% extends 'base.html' %}
{% block title %}Login{% endblock %}
{% block content %}
<h2>Log In</h2>
<form method="post">
{% csrf_token %}
{{ form.as_p }}
<button type="submit">Log In</button>
</form>
{% endblock %}
Now update our urls.py file so we can display the homepage. Normally I would prefer to create a dedicated pages app for this
purpose, but we don't have to and for simplicity, we'll just add it to our existing django_project/urls.py file. Make sure to import
TemplateView on the third line and then add a urlpattern for it at the path ''.
# django_project/urls.py
from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include
from django.views.generic.base import TemplateView # new
urlpatterns = [
path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
path('accounts/', include('django.contrib.auth.urls')),
path('', TemplateView.as_view(template_name='home.html'), name='home'), # new
]
And we're done. If you start the Django server again with python manage.py runserver and navigate to the homepage at
http://127.0.0.1:8000/ you'll see the following:
It worked! But how do we logout? The only option currently is to go into the admin panel at http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/ and click
on the "Logout" link in the upper right corner.
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This will log us out as seen by the redirect page:
If you go to the homepage again at http://127.0.0.1:8000/ and refresh the page, we can see we're logged out.
Logout link
Let's add a logout link to our page so users can easily toggle back and forth between the two states. Fortunately the Django auth
app already provides us with a built-in url and view for this. And if you think about it, we don't need to display anything on logout so
there's no need for a template. All really we do after a successful "logout" request is redirect to another page.
So let's first add a link to the built-in logout url in our home.html file:
<!-- templates/home.html-->
{% extends 'base.html' %}
{% block title %}Home{% endblock %}
{% block content %}
{% if user.is_authenticated %}
Hi {{ user.username }}!
<p><a href="{% url 'logout' %}">Log Out</a></p>
{% else %}
<p>You are not logged in</p>
<a href="{% url 'login' %}">Log In</a>
{% endif %}
{% endblock %}
Then update settings.py with our redirect link which is called LOGOUT_REDIRECT_URL. Add it right next to our login redirect so the
bottom of the settings.py file should look as follows:
# django_project/settings.py
LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL = "/"
LOGOUT_REDIRECT_URL = "/" # new
Actually, now that we have a homepage view we should use that instead of our current hardcoded approach. What's the url name of
our homepage? It's home, which we named in our django_project/urls.py file:
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# django_project/urls.py
...
path("", TemplateView.as_view(template_name="home.html"), name="home"),
...
So we can replace "/" with home at the bottom of the settings.py file:
# django_project/settings.py
LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL = "home"
LOGOUT_REDIRECT_URL = "home"
Now if you revisit the homepage and login you'll be redirected to the new homepage that has a "logout" link for logged in users.
Clicking it takes you back to the homepage with a "login" link.
Conclusion
With very little code we have a robust login and logout authentication system. It probably feels a bit like magic since the auth app did
much of the heavy lifting for us. One of the nice things about Django is while it provides a lot of functionality out-of-the-box, it's
designed to be customizable too.
In the next post, Django Signup Tutorial, we'll learn how to add a signup page to register new users.
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