How do I use the built in password reset/change views with my own templates

If you take a look at the sources for django.contrib.auth.views.password_reset you'll see that it uses RequestContext. The upshot is, you can use Context Processors to modify the context which may allow you to inject the information that you need.

The b-list has a good introduction to context processors.

Edit (I seem to have been confused about what the actual question was):

You'll notice that password_reset takes a named parameter called template_name:

def password_reset(request, is_admin_site=False, 
            template_name='registration/password_reset_form.html',
            email_template_name='registration/password_reset_email.html',
            password_reset_form=PasswordResetForm, 
            token_generator=default_token_generator,
            post_reset_redirect=None):

Check password_reset for more information.

... thus, with a urls.py like:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
from django.contrib.auth.views import password_reset

urlpatterns = patterns('',
     (r'^/accounts/password/reset/$', password_reset, {'template_name': 'my_templates/password_reset.html'}),
     ...
)

django.contrib.auth.views.password_reset will be called for URLs matching '/accounts/password/reset' with the keyword argument template_name = 'my_templates/password_reset.html'.

Otherwise, you don't need to provide any context as the password_reset view takes care of itself. If you want to see what context you have available, you can trigger a TemplateSyntax error and look through the stack trace find the frame with a local variable named context. If you want to modify the context then what I said above about context processors is probably the way to go.

In summary: what do you need to do to use your own template? Provide a template_name keyword argument to the view when it is called. You can supply keyword arguments to views by including a dictionary as the third member of a URL pattern tuple.

Strongly recommend this article.

I just plugged it in and it worked

http://garmoncheg.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/django-resetting-passwords-with.html

You just need to wrap the existing functions and pass in the template you want. For example:

from django.contrib.auth.views import password_reset

def my_password_reset(request, template_name='path/to/my/template'):
    return password_reset(request, template_name)

To see this just have a look at the function declartion of the built in views:

http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/contrib/auth/views.py#L74

You can do the following:

1. add to your urlpatterns (r'^/accounts/password/reset/$', password_reset)
2. put your template in '/templates/registration/password_reset_form.html'
3. make your app come before 'django.contrib.auth' in INSTALLED_APPS

Explanation:

When the templates are loaded, they are searched in your INSTALLED_APPS variable in settings.py . The order is dictated by the definition's rank in INSTALLED_APPS, so since your app come before 'django.contrib.auth' your template were loaded (reference: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/api/#django.template.loaders.app_directories.Loader).

Motivation of approach:

1. I want be more dry and don't repeat for any view(defined by django) the template name (they are already defined in django)
2. I want a smallest url.py

Another, perhaps simpler, solution is to add your override template directory to the DIRS entry of the TEMPLATES setting in settings.py. (I think this setting is new in Django 1.8. It may have been called TEMPLATE_DIRS in previous Django versions.)

Like so:

TEMPLATES = [
   {
        'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
        # allow overriding templates from other installed apps                                                                                                
        'DIRS': ['my_app/templates'],
        'APP_DIRS': True,
}]

Then put your override template files under my_app/templates. So the overridden password reset template would be my_app/templates/registration/password_reset_form.html