Customizing authentication in Django

The authentication that comes with Django is good enough for most common cases, but you may have needs not met by the out-of-the-box defaults. To customize authentication to your projects needs involves understanding what points of the provided system are extensible or replaceable. This document provides details about how the auth system can be customized.

Authentication backends provide an extensible system for when a username and password stored with the User model need to be authenticated against a different service than Django’s default.

You can give your models custom permissions that can be checked through Django’s authorization system.

You can extend the default User model, or substitute a completely customized model.

Other authentication sources

There may be times you have the need to hook into another authentication source – that is, another source of usernames and passwords or authentication methods.

For example, your company may already have an LDAP setup that stores a username and password for every employee. It’d be a hassle for both the network administrator and the users themselves if users had separate accounts in LDAP and the Django-based applications.

So, to handle situations like this, the Django authentication system lets you plug in other authentication sources. You can override Django’s default database-based scheme, or you can use the default system in tandem with other systems.

See the authentication backend reference for information on the authentication backends included with Django.

Specifying authentication backends

Behind the scenes, Django maintains a list of “authentication backends” that it checks for authentication. When somebody calls django.contrib.auth.authenticate() – as described in How to log a user in – Django tries authenticating across all of its authentication backends. If the first authentication method fails, Django tries the second one, and so on, until all backends have been attempted.

The list of authentication backends to use is specified in the AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS setting. This should be a tuple of Python path names that point to Python classes that know how to authenticate. These classes can be anywhere on your Python path.

By default, AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS is set to:

('django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',)

That’s the basic authentication backend that checks the Django users database and queries the built-in permissions. It does not provide protection against brute force attacks via any rate limiting mechanism. You may either implement your own rate limiting mechanism in a custom auth backend, or use the mechanisms provided by most Web servers.

The order of AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS matters, so if the same username and password is valid in multiple backends, Django will stop processing at the first positive match.

If a backend raises a PermissionDenied exception, authentication will immediately fail. Django won’t check the backends that follow.

Note

Once a user has authenticated, Django stores which backend was used to authenticate the user in the user’s session, and re-uses the same backend for the duration of that session whenever access to the currently authenticated user is needed. This effectively means that authentication sources are cached on a per-session basis, so if you change AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS, you’ll need to clear out session data if you need to force users to re-authenticate using different methods. A simple way to do that is simply to execute Session.objects.all().delete().

Writing an authentication backend

An authentication backend is a class that implements two required methods: get_user(user_id) and authenticate(**credentials), as well as a set of optional permission related authorization methods.

The get_user method takes a user_id – which could be a username, database ID or whatever, but has to be the primary key of your User object – and returns a User object.

The authenticate method takes credentials as keyword arguments. Most of the time, it’ll just look like this:

class MyBackend(object):
    def authenticate(self, username=None, password=None):
        # Check the username/password and return a User.
        ...

But it could also authenticate a token, like so:

class MyBackend(object):
    def authenticate(self, token=None):
        # Check the token and return a User.
        ...

Either way, authenticate should check the credentials it gets, and it should return a User object that matches those credentials, if the credentials are valid. If they’re not valid, it should return None.

The Django admin is tightly coupled to the Django User object. The best way to deal with this is to create a Django User object for each user that exists for your backend (e.g., in your LDAP directory, your external SQL database, etc.) You can either write a script to do this in advance, or your authenticate method can do it the first time a user logs in.

Here’s an example backend that authenticates against a username and password variable defined in your settings.py file and creates a Django User object the first time a user authenticates:

from django.conf import settings
from django.contrib.auth.hashers import check_password
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class SettingsBackend(object):
    """
    Authenticate against the settings ADMIN_LOGIN and ADMIN_PASSWORD.

    Use the login name, and a hash of the password. For example:

    ADMIN_LOGIN = 'admin'
    ADMIN_PASSWORD = 'pbkdf2_sha256$30000$Vo0VlMnkR4Bk$qEvtdyZRWTcOsCnI/oQ7fVOu1XAURIZYoOZ3iq8Dr4M='
    """

    def authenticate(self, username=None, password=None):
        login_valid = (settings.ADMIN_LOGIN == username)
        pwd_valid = check_password(password, settings.ADMIN_PASSWORD)
        if login_valid and pwd_valid:
            try:
                user = User.objects.get(username=username)
            except User.DoesNotExist:
                # Create a new user. Note that we can set password
                # to anything, because it won't be checked; the password
                # from settings.py will.
                user = User(username=username, password='get from settings.py')
                user.is_staff = True
                user.is_superuser = True
                user.save()
            return user
        return None

    def get_user(self, user_id):
        try:
            return User.objects.get(pk=user_id)
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return None

Handling authorization in custom backends

Custom auth backends can provide their own permissions.

The user model will delegate permission lookup functions (get_group_permissions(), get_all_permissions(), has_perm(), and has_module_perms()) to any authentication backend that implements these functions.

The permissions given to the user will be the superset of all permissions returned by all backends. That is, Django grants a permission to a user that any one backend grants.

New in Django 1.8:

If a backend raises a PermissionDenied exception in has_perm() or has_module_perms(), the authorization will immediately fail and Django won’t check the backends that follow.

The simple backend above could implement permissions for the magic admin fairly simply:

class SettingsBackend(object):
    ...
    def has_perm(self, user_obj, perm, obj=None):
        if user_obj.username == settings.ADMIN_LOGIN:
            return True
        else:
            return False

This gives full permissions to the user granted access in the above example. Notice that in addition to the same arguments given to the associated django.contrib.auth.models.User functions, the backend auth functions all take the user object, which may be an anonymous user, as an argument.

A full authorization implementation can be found in the ModelBackend class in django/contrib/auth/backends.py, which is the default backend and queries the auth_permission table most of the time. If you wish to provide custom behavior for only part of the backend API, you can take advantage of Python inheritance and subclass ModelBackend instead of implementing the complete API in a custom backend.

Authorization for anonymous users

An anonymous user is one that is not authenticated i.e. they have provided no valid authentication details. However, that does not necessarily mean they are not authorized to do anything. At the most basic level, most Web sites authorize anonymous users to browse most of the site, and many allow anonymous posting of comments etc.

Django’s permission framework does not have a place to store permissions for anonymous users. However, the user object passed to an authentication backend may be an django.contrib.auth.models.AnonymousUser object, allowing the backend to specify custom authorization behavior for anonymous users. This is especially useful for the authors of re-usable apps, who can delegate all questions of authorization to the auth backend, rather than needing settings, for example, to control anonymous access.

Authorization for inactive users

An inactive user is a one that is authenticated but has its attribute is_active set to False. However this does not mean they are not authorized to do anything. For example they are allowed to activate their account.

The support for anonymous users in the permission system allows for a scenario where anonymous users have permissions to do something while inactive authenticated users do not.

Do not forget to test for the is_active attribute of the user in your own backend permission methods.

Handling object permissions

Django’s permission framework has a foundation for object permissions, though there is no implementation for it in the core. That means that checking for object permissions will always return False or an empty list (depending on the check performed). An authentication backend will receive the keyword parameters obj and user_obj for each object related authorization method and can return the object level permission as appropriate.

Custom permissions

To create custom permissions for a given model object, use the permissions model Meta attribute.

This example Task model creates three custom permissions, i.e., actions users can or cannot do with Task instances, specific to your application:

class Task(models.Model):
    ...
    class Meta:
        permissions = (
            ("view_task", "Can see available tasks"),
            ("change_task_status", "Can change the status of tasks"),
            ("close_task", "Can remove a task by setting its status as closed"),
        )

The only thing this does is create those extra permissions when you run manage.py migrate (the function that creates permissions is connected to the post_migrate signal). Your code is in charge of checking the value of these permissions when a user is trying to access the functionality provided by the application (viewing tasks, changing the status of tasks, closing tasks.) Continuing the above example, the following checks if a user may view tasks:

user.has_perm('app.view_task')

Extending the existing User model

There are two ways to extend the default User model without substituting your own model. If the changes you need are purely behavioral, and don’t require any change to what is stored in the database, you can create a proxy model based on User. This allows for any of the features offered by proxy models including default ordering, custom managers, or custom model methods.

If you wish to store information related to User, you can use a one-to-one relationship to a model containing the fields for additional information. This one-to-one model is often called a profile model, as it might store non-auth related information about a site user. For example you might create an Employee model:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class Employee(models.Model):
    user = models.OneToOneField(User)
    department = models.CharField(max_length=100)

Assuming an existing Employee Fred Smith who has both a User and Employee model, you can access the related information using Django’s standard related model conventions:

>>> u = User.objects.get(username='fsmith')
>>> freds_department = u.employee.department

To add a profile model’s fields to the user page in the admin, define an InlineModelAdmin (for this example, we’ll use a StackedInline) in your app’s admin.py and add it to a UserAdmin class which is registered with the User class:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.contrib.auth.admin import UserAdmin as BaseUserAdmin
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

from my_user_profile_app.models import Employee

# Define an inline admin descriptor for Employee model
# which acts a bit like a singleton
class EmployeeInline(admin.StackedInline):
    model = Employee
    can_delete = False
    verbose_name_plural = 'employee'

# Define a new User admin
class UserAdmin(BaseUserAdmin):
    inlines = (EmployeeInline, )

# Re-register UserAdmin
admin.site.unregister(User)
admin.site.register(User, UserAdmin)

These profile models are not special in any way - they are just Django models that happen to have a one-to-one link with a User model. As such, they do not get auto created when a user is created, but a django.db.models.signals.post_save could be used to create or update related models as appropriate.

Note that using related models results in additional queries or joins to retrieve the related data, and depending on your needs substituting the User model and adding the related fields may be your better option. However existing links to the default User model within your project’s apps may justify the extra database load.

Substituting a custom User model

Some kinds of projects may have authentication requirements for which Django’s built-in User model is not always appropriate. For instance, on some sites it makes more sense to use an email address as your identification token instead of a username.

Django allows you to override the default User model by providing a value for the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting that references a custom model:

AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'myapp.MyUser'

This dotted pair describes the name of the Django app (which must be in your INSTALLED_APPS), and the name of the Django model that you wish to use as your User model.

Warning

Changing AUTH_USER_MODEL has a big effect on your database structure. It changes the tables that are available, and it will affect the construction of foreign keys and many-to-many relationships. If you intend to set AUTH_USER_MODEL, you should set it before creating any migrations or running manage.py migrate for the first time.

Changing this setting after you have tables created is not supported by makemigrations and will result in you having to manually fix your schema, port your data from the old user table, and possibly manually reapply some migrations.

Warning

Due to limitations of Django’s dynamic dependency feature for swappable models, you must ensure that the model referenced by AUTH_USER_MODEL is created in the first migration of its app (usually called 0001_initial); otherwise, you will have dependency issues.

In addition, you may run into a CircularDependencyError when running your migrations as Django won’t be able to automatically break the dependency loop due to the dynamic dependency. If you see this error, you should break the loop by moving the models depended on by your User model into a second migration (you can try making two normal models that have a ForeignKey to each other and seeing how makemigrations resolves that circular dependency if you want to see how it’s usually done)

Reusable apps and AUTH_USER_MODEL

Reusable apps shouldn’t implement a custom user model. A project may use many apps, and two reusable apps that implemented a custom user model couldn’t be used together. If you need to store per user information in your app, use a ForeignKey or OneToOneField to settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL as described below.

Referencing the User model

If you reference User directly (for example, by referring to it in a foreign key), your code will not work in projects where the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting has been changed to a different User model.

get_user_model()[source]

Instead of referring to User directly, you should reference the user model using django.contrib.auth.get_user_model(). This method will return the currently active User model – the custom User model if one is specified, or User otherwise.

When you define a foreign key or many-to-many relations to the User model, you should specify the custom model using the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting. For example:

from django.conf import settings
from django.db import models

class Article(models.Model):
    author = models.ForeignKey(settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL)

New in Django 1.7:

When connecting to signals sent by the User model, you should specify the custom model using the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting. For example:

from django.conf import settings
from django.db.models.signals import post_save

def post_save_receiver(sender, instance, created, **kwargs):
    pass

post_save.connect(post_save_receiver, sender=settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL)

Generally speaking, you should reference the User model with the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting in code that is executed at import time. get_user_model() only works once Django has imported all models.

Specifying a custom User model

Model design considerations

Think carefully before handling information not directly related to authentication in your custom User Model.

It may be better to store app-specific user information in a model that has a relation with the User model. That allows each app to specify its own user data requirements without risking conflicts with other apps. On the other hand, queries to retrieve this related information will involve a database join, which may have an effect on performance.

Django expects your custom User model to meet some minimum requirements.

1. Your model must have a single unique field that can be used for identification purposes. This can be a username, an email address, or any other unique attribute.
2. Your model must provide a way to address the user in a “short” and “long” form. The most common interpretation of this would be to use the user’s given name as the “short” identifier, and the user’s full name as the “long” identifier. However, there are no constraints on what these two methods return - if you want, they can return exactly the same value.

Changed in Django 1.8:

Older versions of Django required your model to have an integer primary key as well.

The easiest way to construct a compliant custom User model is to inherit from AbstractBaseUser. AbstractBaseUser provides the core implementation of a User model, including hashed passwords and tokenized password resets. You must then provide some key implementation details:

class models.CustomUser

USERNAME_FIELD

A string describing the name of the field on the User model that is used as the unique identifier. This will usually be a username of some kind, but it can also be an email address, or any other unique identifier. The field must be unique (i.e., have unique=True set in its definition).

In the following example, the field identifier is used as the identifying field:

class MyUser(AbstractBaseUser):
    identifier = models.CharField(max_length=40, unique=True)
    ...
    USERNAME_FIELD = 'identifier'

New in Django 1.8.

USERNAME_FIELD now supports ForeignKeys. Since there is no way to pass model instances during the createsuperuser prompt, expect the user to enter the value of to_field value (the primary_key by default) of an existing instance.

REQUIRED_FIELDS

A list of the field names that will be prompted for when creating a user via the createsuperuser management command. The user will be prompted to supply a value for each of these fields. It must include any field for which blank is False or undefined and may include additional fields you want prompted for when a user is created interactively. REQUIRED_FIELDS has no effect in other parts of Django, like creating a user in the admin.

For example, here is the partial definition for a User model that defines two required fields - a date of birth and height:

class MyUser(AbstractBaseUser):
    ...
    date_of_birth = models.DateField()
    height = models.FloatField()
    ...
    REQUIRED_FIELDS = ['date_of_birth', 'height']

Note

REQUIRED_FIELDS must contain all required fields on your User model, but should not contain the USERNAME_FIELD or password as these fields will always be prompted for.

New in Django 1.8.

REQUIRED_FIELDS now supports ForeignKeys. Since there is no way to pass model instances during the createsuperuser prompt, expect the user to enter the value of to_field value (the primary_key by default) of an existing instance.

is_active

A boolean attribute that indicates whether the user is considered “active”. This attribute is provided as an attribute on AbstractBaseUser defaulting to True. How you choose to implement it will depend on the details of your chosen auth backends. See the documentation of the is_active attribute on the built-in user model for details.

get_full_name()

A longer formal identifier for the user. A common interpretation would be the full name of the user, but it can be any string that identifies the user.

get_short_name()

A short, informal identifier for the user. A common interpretation would be the first name of the user, but it can be any string that identifies the user in an informal way. It may also return the same value as django.contrib.auth.models.User.get_full_name().

The following methods are available on any subclass of AbstractBaseUser:

class models.AbstractBaseUser

get_username()

Returns the value of the field nominated by USERNAME_FIELD.

is_anonymous()

Always returns False. This is a way of differentiating from AnonymousUser objects. Generally, you should prefer using is_authenticated() to this method.

is_authenticated()

Always returns True. This is a way to tell if the user has been authenticated. This does not imply any permissions, and doesn’t check if the user is active - it only indicates that the user has provided a valid username and password.

set_password(raw_password)

Sets the user’s password to the given raw string, taking care of the password hashing. Doesn’t save the AbstractBaseUser object.

When the raw_password is None, the password will be set to an unusable password, as if set_unusable_password() were used.

check_password(raw_password)

Returns True if the given raw string is the correct password for the user. (This takes care of the password hashing in making the comparison.)

set_unusable_password()

Marks the user as having no password set. This isn’t the same as having a blank string for a password. check_password() for this user will never return True. Doesn’t save the AbstractBaseUser object.

You may need this if authentication for your application takes place against an existing external source such as an LDAP directory.

has_usable_password()

Returns False if set_unusable_password() has been called for this user.

get_session_auth_hash()

New in Django 1.7.

Returns an HMAC of the password field. Used for Session invalidation on password change.

You should also define a custom manager for your User model. If your User model defines username, email, is_staff, is_active, is_superuser, last_login, and date_joined fields the same as Django’s default User, you can just install Django’s UserManager; however, if your User model defines different fields, you will need to define a custom manager that extends BaseUserManager providing two additional methods:

class models.CustomUserManager

create_user(*username_field*, password=None, **other_fields)

The prototype of create_user() should accept the username field, plus all required fields as arguments. For example, if your user model uses email as the username field, and has date_of_birth as a required field, then create_user should be defined as:

def create_user(self, email, date_of_birth, password=None):
    # create user here
    ...

create_superuser(*username_field*, password, **other_fields)

The prototype of create_superuser() should accept the username field, plus all required fields as arguments. For example, if your user model uses email as the username field, and has date_of_birth as a required field, then create_superuser should be defined as:

def create_superuser(self, email, date_of_birth, password):
    # create superuser here
    ...

Unlike create_user(), create_superuser() must require the caller to provide a password.

BaseUserManager provides the following utility methods:

class models.BaseUserManager

normalize_email(email)

A classmethod that normalizes email addresses by lowercasing the domain portion of the email address.

get_by_natural_key(username)

Retrieves a user instance using the contents of the field nominated by USERNAME_FIELD.

make_random_password(length=10, allowed_chars='abcdefghjkmnpqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ23456789')

Returns a random password with the given length and given string of allowed characters. Note that the default value of allowed_chars doesn’t contain letters that can cause user confusion, including:

• i, l, I, and 1 (lowercase letter i, lowercase letter L, uppercase letter i, and the number one)
• o, O, and 0 (lowercase letter o, uppercase letter o, and zero)

Extending Django’s default User

If you’re entirely happy with Django’s User model and you just want to add some additional profile information, you could simply subclass django.contrib.auth.models.AbstractUser and add your custom profile fields, although we’d recommend a separate model as described in the “Model design considerations” note of Specifying a custom User model. AbstractUser provides the full implementation of the default User as an abstract model.

Custom users and the built-in auth forms

As you may expect, built-in Django’s forms and views make certain assumptions about the user model that they are working with.

If your user model doesn’t follow the same assumptions, it may be necessary to define a replacement form, and pass that form in as part of the configuration of the auth views.

• UserCreationForm

  Depends on the User model. Must be re-written for any custom user model.

• UserChangeForm

  Depends on the User model. Must be re-written for any custom user model.

• AuthenticationForm

  Works with any subclass of AbstractBaseUser, and will adapt to use the field defined in USERNAME_FIELD.

• PasswordResetForm

  Assumes that the user model has a field named email that can be used to identify the user and a boolean field named is_active to prevent password resets for inactive users.

• SetPasswordForm

  Works with any subclass of AbstractBaseUser

• PasswordChangeForm

  Works with any subclass of AbstractBaseUser

• AdminPasswordChangeForm

  Works with any subclass of AbstractBaseUser

Custom users and django.contrib.admin

If you want your custom User model to also work with Admin, your User model must define some additional attributes and methods. These methods allow the admin to control access of the User to admin content:

class models.CustomUser

is_staff

Returns True if the user is allowed to have access to the admin site.

is_active

Returns True if the user account is currently active.

has_perm(perm, obj=None):

Returns True if the user has the named permission. If obj is provided, the permission needs to be checked against a specific object instance.

has_module_perms(app_label):

Returns True if the user has permission to access models in the given app.

You will also need to register your custom User model with the admin. If your custom User model extends django.contrib.auth.models.AbstractUser, you can use Django’s existing django.contrib.auth.admin.UserAdmin class. However, if your User model extends AbstractBaseUser, you’ll need to define a custom ModelAdmin class. It may be possible to subclass the default django.contrib.auth.admin.UserAdmin; however, you’ll need to override any of the definitions that refer to fields on django.contrib.auth.models.AbstractUser that aren’t on your custom User class.

Custom users and permissions

To make it easy to include Django’s permission framework into your own User class, Django provides PermissionsMixin. This is an abstract model you can include in the class hierarchy for your User model, giving you all the methods and database fields necessary to support Django’s permission model.

PermissionsMixin provides the following methods and attributes:

class models.PermissionsMixin

is_superuser

Boolean. Designates that this user has all permissions without explicitly assigning them.

get_group_permissions(obj=None)

Returns a set of permission strings that the user has, through their groups.

If obj is passed in, only returns the group permissions for this specific object.

get_all_permissions(obj=None)

Returns a set of permission strings that the user has, both through group and user permissions.

If obj is passed in, only returns the permissions for this specific object.

has_perm(perm, obj=None)

Returns True if the user has the specified permission, where perm is in the format "<app label>.<permission codename>" (see permissions). If the user is inactive, this method will always return False.

If obj is passed in, this method won’t check for a permission for the model, but for this specific object.

has_perms(perm_list, obj=None)

Returns True if the user has each of the specified permissions, where each perm is in the format "<app label>.<permission codename>". If the user is inactive, this method will always return False.

If obj is passed in, this method won’t check for permissions for the model, but for the specific object.

has_module_perms(package_name)

Returns True if the user has any permissions in the given package (the Django app label). If the user is inactive, this method will always return False.

ModelBackend

If you don’t include the PermissionsMixin, you must ensure you don’t invoke the permissions methods on ModelBackend. ModelBackend assumes that certain fields are available on your user model. If your User model doesn’t provide those fields, you will receive database errors when you check permissions.

Custom users and Proxy models

One limitation of custom User models is that installing a custom User model will break any proxy model extending User. Proxy models must be based on a concrete base class; by defining a custom User model, you remove the ability of Django to reliably identify the base class.

If your project uses proxy models, you must either modify the proxy to extend the User model that is currently in use in your project, or merge your proxy’s behavior into your User subclass.

A full example

Here is an example of an admin-compliant custom user app. This user model uses an email address as the username, and has a required date of birth; it provides no permission checking, beyond a simple admin flag on the user account. This model would be compatible with all the built-in auth forms and views, except for the User creation forms. This example illustrates how most of the components work together, but is not intended to be copied directly into projects for production use.

This code would all live in a models.py file for a custom authentication app:

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import (
    BaseUserManager, AbstractBaseUser
)


class MyUserManager(BaseUserManager):
    def create_user(self, email, date_of_birth, password=None):
        """
        Creates and saves a User with the given email, date of
        birth and password.
        """
        if not email:
            raise ValueError('Users must have an email address')

        user = self.model(
            email=self.normalize_email(email),
            date_of_birth=date_of_birth,
        )

        user.set_password(password)
        user.save(using=self._db)
        return user

    def create_superuser(self, email, date_of_birth, password):
        """
        Creates and saves a superuser with the given email, date of
        birth and password.
        """
        user = self.create_user(email,
            password=password,
            date_of_birth=date_of_birth
        )
        user.is_admin = True
        user.save(using=self._db)
        return user


class MyUser(AbstractBaseUser):
    email = models.EmailField(
        verbose_name='email address',
        max_length=255,
        unique=True,
    )
    date_of_birth = models.DateField()
    is_active = models.BooleanField(default=True)
    is_admin = models.BooleanField(default=False)

    objects = MyUserManager()

    USERNAME_FIELD = 'email'
    REQUIRED_FIELDS = ['date_of_birth']

    def get_full_name(self):
        # The user is identified by their email address
        return self.email

    def get_short_name(self):
        # The user is identified by their email address
        return self.email

    def __str__(self):              # __unicode__ on Python 2
        return self.email

    def has_perm(self, perm, obj=None):
        "Does the user have a specific permission?"
        # Simplest possible answer: Yes, always
        return True

    def has_module_perms(self, app_label):
        "Does the user have permissions to view the app `app_label`?"
        # Simplest possible answer: Yes, always
        return True

    @property
    def is_staff(self):
        "Is the user a member of staff?"
        # Simplest possible answer: All admins are staff
        return self.is_admin

Then, to register this custom User model with Django’s admin, the following code would be required in the app’s admin.py file:

from django import forms
from django.contrib import admin
from django.contrib.auth.models import Group
from django.contrib.auth.admin import UserAdmin as BaseUserAdmin
from django.contrib.auth.forms import ReadOnlyPasswordHashField

from customauth.models import MyUser


class UserCreationForm(forms.ModelForm):
    """A form for creating new users. Includes all the required
    fields, plus a repeated password."""
    password1 = forms.CharField(label='Password', widget=forms.PasswordInput)
    password2 = forms.CharField(label='Password confirmation', widget=forms.PasswordInput)

    class Meta:
        model = MyUser
        fields = ('email', 'date_of_birth')

    def clean_password2(self):
        # Check that the two password entries match
        password1 = self.cleaned_data.get("password1")
        password2 = self.cleaned_data.get("password2")
        if password1 and password2 and password1 != password2:
            raise forms.ValidationError("Passwords don't match")
        return password2

    def save(self, commit=True):
        # Save the provided password in hashed format
        user = super(UserCreationForm, self).save(commit=False)
        user.set_password(self.cleaned_data["password1"])
        if commit:
            user.save()
        return user


class UserChangeForm(forms.ModelForm):
    """A form for updating users. Includes all the fields on
    the user, but replaces the password field with admin's
    password hash display field.
    """
    password = ReadOnlyPasswordHashField()

    class Meta:
        model = MyUser
        fields = ('email', 'password', 'date_of_birth', 'is_active', 'is_admin')

    def clean_password(self):
        # Regardless of what the user provides, return the initial value.
        # This is done here, rather than on the field, because the
        # field does not have access to the initial value
        return self.initial["password"]


class UserAdmin(BaseUserAdmin):
    # The forms to add and change user instances
    form = UserChangeForm
    add_form = UserCreationForm

    # The fields to be used in displaying the User model.
    # These override the definitions on the base UserAdmin
    # that reference specific fields on auth.User.
    list_display = ('email', 'date_of_birth', 'is_admin')
    list_filter = ('is_admin',)
    fieldsets = (
        (None, {'fields': ('email', 'password')}),
        ('Personal info', {'fields': ('date_of_birth',)}),
        ('Permissions', {'fields': ('is_admin',)}),
    )
    # add_fieldsets is not a standard ModelAdmin attribute. UserAdmin
    # overrides get_fieldsets to use this attribute when creating a user.
    add_fieldsets = (
        (None, {
            'classes': ('wide',),
            'fields': ('email', 'date_of_birth', 'password1', 'password2')}
        ),
    )
    search_fields = ('email',)
    ordering = ('email',)
    filter_horizontal = ()

# Now register the new UserAdmin...
admin.site.register(MyUser, UserAdmin)
# ... and, since we're not using Django's built-in permissions,
# unregister the Group model from admin.
admin.site.unregister(Group)

Finally, specify the custom model as the default user model for your project using the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting in your settings.py:

AUTH_USER_MODEL = 'customauth.MyUser'