How to automatically login a user after registration in django

This is what I am currently using for registration:

def register(request):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = UserCreationForm(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            new_user = form.save()
            messages.info(request, "Thanks for registering. Please login to continue.")
            return HttpResponseRedirect("/dashboard/")
    else:
        form = UserCreationForm()
    return render_to_response("accounts/register.html", {
        'form': form,
    }, context_instance=RequestContext(request))

Is it possible not to require the user to login manually after creating an account, but rather simply to log them in automatically? Thanks.

edit: I had tried the login() function without success. I believe the problem is that AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS was not set.

Solution 1:

Using the authenticate() and login() functions:

from django.contrib.auth import authenticate, login

def register(request):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = UserCreationForm(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            new_user = form.save()
            messages.info(request, "Thanks for registering. You are now logged in.")
            new_user = authenticate(username=form.cleaned_data['username'],
                                    password=form.cleaned_data['password1'],
                                    )
            login(request, new_user)
            return HttpResponseRedirect("/dashboard/")

Solution 2:

for class based views here was the code that worked for me (originally Django 1.7, updated for 2.1)

from django.contrib.auth import authenticate, login
from django.contrib.auth.forms import UserCreationForm
from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect
from django.views.generic import FormView

class SignUp(FormView):
    template_name = 'signup.html'
    form_class = UserCreateForm
    success_url='/account'

    def form_valid(self, form):
        #save the new user first
        form.save()
        #get the username and password
        username = self.request.POST['username']
        password = self.request.POST['password1']
        #authenticate user then login
        user = authenticate(username=username, password=password)
        login(self.request, user)
        return HttpResponseRedirect(self.get_success_url)

Solution 3:

You can subclass Django's UserCreationForm and override it's save method to log them in when commit=True.

forms.py

from django.contrib.auth.forms import UserCreationForm
from django.contrib.auth import login

class CustomUserCreationForm(UserCreationForm):
    """
    A ModelForm for creating a User and logging 
    them in after commiting a save of the form.
    """

    def __init__(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.request = request

    class Meta(UserCreationForm.Meta):
        pass

    def save(self, commit=True):
        user = super().save(commit=commit)
        if commit:
            auth_user = authenticate(
                username=self.cleaned_data['username'], 
                password=self.cleaned_data['password1']
            )
            login(self.request, auth_user)

        return user

You just need to make sure you pass in a request object when you instantiate the form. You can do that by overriding the view's get_form_kwargs method.

views.py

def get_form_kwargs(self):
    form_kwargs = super().get_form_kwargs()
    form_kwargs['request'] = self.request
    return form_kwargs

Or, make sure when you instantiate a form_class you do CustomUserCreationForm(data=request.POST, request=self.request).