# Quick start guide

First you’ll need to have Django and django-registration installed; for details on that, see the installation guide.

The next steps will depend on which registration workflow you’d like to use. There are two workflows built into django-registration:

- The two-step activation workflow, which implements a two-step process: a user signs up, then is emailed an activation link and must click it to activate the account.

- The one-step workflow, in which a user signs up and their account is immediately active and logged in.

If you want a signup process other than what’s provided by these built-in workflows, please see the documentation for the base view and form classes, which you can subclass to implement your own preferred user registration flow and rules. The guide below covers use of the built-in workflows.

Regardless of which registration workflow you choose to use, you should add “django_registration” to your `INSTALLED_APPS` setting.

Important

Django’s authentication system must be installed

Before proceeding with either of the recommended built-in workflows, you’ll need to ensure django.contrib.auth has been installed (by adding it to `INSTALLED_APPS` and running manage.py migrate to install needed database tables). Also, if you’re making use of a custom user model, you’ll probably want to pause and read the custom user compatibility guide before using django-registration.

Note

Additional steps for account security

While django-registration does what it can to secure the user signup process, its scope is deliberately limited; please read the security documentation for recommendations on steps to secure user accounts beyond what django-registration alone can do.

## Configuring the two-step activation workflow

The configuration process for using the two-step activation workflow is straightforward: you’ll need to specify a couple of settings, connect some URLs and create a few templates.

### 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:

    ACCOUNT_ACTIVATION_DAYS = 7 # One-week activation window

### 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. The URLconf for the two-step activation workflow can be found at django_registration.backends.activation.urls. For example, to place the registration URLs under the prefix /accounts/, you could add the following to your project’s root URLconf:

    from django.urls import include, path

    urlpatterns = [
        # Other URL patterns ...
        path('accounts/', include('django_registration.backends.activation.urls')),
        path('accounts/', include('django.contrib.auth.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.

The sample URL configuration above also sets up the built-in auth views included in Django (login, logout, password reset, etc.) via the django.contrib.auth.urls URLconf.

The following URL names are defined by django_registration.backends.activation.urls:

- django_registration_register is the account-registration view.

- django_registration_complete is the post-registration success message.

- django_registration_activate is the account-activation view.

- django_registration_activation_complete is the post-activation success message.

- django_registration_disallowed is a message indicating registration is not currently permitted.

### 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.

#### django_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.

#### django_registration/registration_complete.html

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

#### django_registration/registration_closed.html

Used when registration of new user accounts is disabled. This template has no context variables of its own.

#### django_registration/activation_failed.html

Used if account activation fails. Has the following context:

activation_error

  A `dict` containing the information supplied to the `ActivationError` which occurred during activation. See the documentation for that exception for a description of the keys, and the documentation for `ActivationView` for the specific values used in different failure situations.

#### django_registration/activation_complete.html

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

#### django_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, as a string.

expiration_days

  The number of days remaining during which the account may be activated, as an integer.

request

  The `HttpRequest` object representing the request in which the user registered.

scheme

  The protocol scheme used during registration, as a string; will be either ‘http’ or ‘https’.

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.

user

  The newly-created user object.

#### django_registration/activation_email_body.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, as a string.

expiration_days

  The number of days remaining during which the account may be activated, as an integer.

request

  The `HttpRequest` object representing the request in which the user registered.

scheme

  The protocol scheme used during registration, as a string; will be either ‘http’ or ‘https’.

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.

user

  The newly-created user object.

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 produces plain-text email, and so these templates should output plain text rather than HTML.

To make use of the views from django.contrib.auth (which are set up for you by the example URL configuration 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.

## Configuring the one-step workflow

Also included is a one-step registration workflow, where a user signs up and their account is immediately active and logged in.

You will need to configure URLs to use the one-step workflow; the easiest way is to `include()` the URLconf django_registration.backends.one_step.urls somewhere in your URL configuration. For example, to place the URLs under the prefix /accounts/ in your URL structure:

    from django.urls import include, path

    urlpatterns = [
        # Other URL patterns ...
        path('accounts/', include('django_registration.backends.one_step.urls')),
        path('accounts/', include('django.contrib.auth.urls')),
        # More URL patterns ...
    ]

Users could then register accounts by visiting the URL /accounts/register/.

The following URL names are defined by django_registration.backends.one_step.urls:

- django_registration_register is the account-registration view.

- django_registration_complete is the post-registration success message.

- django_registration_disallowed is a message indicating registration is not currently permitted.

This URLconf will also configure the appropriate URLs for the rest of the built-in django.contrib.auth views (log in, log out, password reset, etc.).

Finally, you will need to create following templates:

- django_registration/registration_form.html

- django_registration/registration_complete.html

- django_registration/registration_closed.html

See the documentation above for details of these templates.

To make use of the views from django.contrib.auth (which are set up for you by the example URL configuration 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.