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

You say you've written a custom authentication backend, but in fact what you seem to have written is a complete custom authentication app, which doesn't interface with Django's contrib.auth.

If you want to use a non-relational database for your authentication data, all you need to do is create a class that provides two methods: get_user(user_id) and authenticate(**credentials). See the documentation. Once you have authenticated a user, you simply call Django's normal login methods. There should be no reason to manually set request.user or put anything into the session.

Update after edit That has nothing to do with it. There's no requirement that the user class derives from auth.models.User. You still just need to define a get_user method that will return an instance of your user class.