Making email field unique with Django User admin

Question

There was a nearly similar question: How to make email field unique in model User from contrib.auth in Django

The solution was not perfect: Validating email for uniqueness. The solution provided is rather funny. It disallows modifications to User that leave email intact. How to fix it? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

in your __init__.py

from django.contrib.auth.models import User

User._meta.get_field_by_name('email')[0]._unique = True

Answer 2

Thanks to Ofri Raviv but what I've seen is not what I needed. So I resolved my own issue and now I'd like to share the tips:

1. Use username instead of email, exclude email from the form. Mask its label as email.

2. Subclass User and create a UNIQUE field which receives email addresses, mask it as email, exclude original email field from the form.

It's that simple but took me some time. Hope it help others with the same need.

Answer 3

This method won't make email field unique at the database level, but it's worth trying.

Use a custom validator:

from django.core.exceptions import ValidationError
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

def validate_email_unique(value):
    exists = User.objects.filter(username=value)
    if exists:
        raise ValidationError("Email address %s already exits, must be unique" % value)

Then in forms.py:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.forms import ModelForm
from main.validators import validate_email_unique


class UserForm(ModelForm):
    #....
    email = forms.CharField(required=True, validators=[validate_email_unique])
    #....