Can django's auth_user.username be varchar(75)? How could that be done?

Is there anything wrong with running alter table on auth_user to make username be varchar(75) so it can fit an email? What does that break if anything?

If you were to change auth_user.username to be varchar(75) where would you need to modify django? Is it simply a matter of changing 30 to 75 in the source code?

username = models.CharField(_('username'), max_length=30, unique=True, help_text=_("Required. 30 characters or fewer. Letters, numbers and @/./+/-/_ characters"))

Or is there other validation on this field that would have to be changed or any other repercussions to doing so?

See comment discussion with bartek below regarding the reason for doing it.

Edit: Looking back on this after many months. For anyone who doesn't know the premise: Some apps don't have a requirement or desire to use a username, they use only email for registration & auth. Unfortunately in django auth.contrib, username is required. You could start putting emails in the username field, but the field is only 30 char and emails may be long in the real world. Potentially even longer than the 75 char suggested here, but 75 char accommodates most sane email addresses. The question is aimed at this situation, as encountered by email-auth-based applications.

There's a way to achieve that without touching the core model, and without inheritance, but it's definitely hackish and I would use it with extra care.

If you look at Django's doc on signals, you'll see there's one called class_prepared, which is basically sent once any actual model class has been created by the metaclass. That moment is your last chance of modifying any model before any magic takes place (ie: ModelForm, ModelAdmin, syncdb, etc...).

So the plan is simple, you just register that signal with a handler that will detect when it is called for the User model, and then change the max_length property of the username field.

Now the question is, where should this code lives? It has to be executed before the User model is loaded, so that often means very early. Unfortunately, you can't (django 1.1.1, haven't check with another version) put that in settings because importing signals there will break things.

A better choice would be to put it in a dummy app's models module, and to put that app on top of the INSTALLED_APPS list/tuple (so it gets imported before anything else). Here is an example of what you can have in myhackishfix_app/models.py :

from django.db.models.signals import class_prepared

def longer_username(sender, *args, **kwargs):
    # You can't just do `if sender == django.contrib.auth.models.User`
    # because you would have to import the model
    # You have to test using __name__ and __module__
    if sender.__name__ == "User" and sender.__module__ == "django.contrib.auth.models":
        sender._meta.get_field("username").max_length = 75

class_prepared.connect(longer_username)

That will do the trick.

A few notes though:

• You might want to change also the help_text of the field, to reflect the new maximum length
• If you want to use the automatic admin, you will have to subclass UserChangeForm, UserCreationForm and AuthenticationForm as the maximum length is not deduced from the model field, but directly in the form field declaration.

If you're using South, you can create the following migration to change the column in the underlying database:

import datetime
from south.db import db
from south.v2 import SchemaMigration
from django.db import models

class Migration(SchemaMigration):

    def forwards(self, orm):

        # Changing field 'User.username'
        db.alter_column('auth_user', 'username', models.CharField(max_length=75))


    def backwards(self, orm):

        # Changing field 'User.username'
        db.alter_column('auth_user', 'username', models.CharField(max_length=35))


    models = { 

# ... Copy the remainder of the file from the previous migration, being sure 
# to change the value for auth.user / usename / maxlength

Based on Clément and Matt Miller's great combined answer above, I've pulled together a quick app that implements it. Pip install, migrate, and go. Would put this as a comment, but don't have the cred yet!

https://github.com/GoodCloud/django-longer-username

EDIT 2014-12-08

The above module is now deprecated in favor of https://github.com/madssj/django-longer-username-and-email