Django, request.user is always Anonymous User

Question

I am using a custom authentication backend for Django (which runs off couchdb). I have a custom user model.

As part of the login, I am doing a request.user = u

Answer 1

I too have custom authentication backend and always got AnonymousUser after successful authentication and login. I had the get_user method in my backend. What I was missing was that get_user must get the user by pk only, not by email or whatever your credentials in authenticate are:

class AccountAuthBackend(object):

@staticmethod
def authenticate(email=None, password=None):
    try:
        user = User.objects.get(email=email)
        if user.check_password(password):
            return user
    except User.DoesNotExist:
        return None

@staticmethod
def get_user(id_):
    try:
        return User.objects.get(pk=id_) # <-- tried to get by email here
    except User.DoesNotExist:
        return None

Its easy to miss this line in the docs:

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.

It so happened that email is not primary key in my schema. Hope this saves somebody some time.