Upgrading from previous versions

The current release series of django-registration is the 3.x series, which is not backwards-compatible with the django-registration 2.x release series.

Changes within the 3.x series

Within the 3.x release series, there have been several minor changes and improvements, documented here along with the version in which they occurred.

django-registration 3.3

This release contains no new features or bugfixes. The supported Python and Django versions are changed to:

• Django 3.2 and 4.0, on Python 3.7 (Django 3.2 only), 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10.

django-registration 3.2

This release contains no new features or bugfixes. The supported Python and Django versions are changed to:

• Django 2.2, 3.1, and 3.2, on Python 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9.

Python 3.5 reached the end of its upstream support cycle in September 2020, and is no longer supported. Django 3.0 reached the end of its upstream support cycle in May 2021, and is no longer supported.

django-registration 3.1.2

This release fixes a security issue with low severity.

Prior to 3.1.2, django-registration did not apply Django’s sensitive_post_parameters() decorator to the base RegistrationView. This meant that if detailed error reports, such as Django’s error reports emailed to site staff, were enabled, and a server-side error occurred during account registration, the generated error report would include all fields submitted in the HTTP request, some of which are potentially sensitive depending on the user-account model and registration workflow in use.

This issue is CVE-2021-21416 and GitHub security advisory GHSA-58c7-px5v-82hh.

Thanks to Martin Morgenstern for reporting this issue.

Django-registration 3.1

• When an attempt was made to use django-registration with a custom user model, but without explicitly subclassing RegistrationForm to point to that user model, previously the result would be a cryptic exception and error message raised from within Django, complaining about trying to work with the swapped-out user model. RegistrationView now explicitly raises ImproperlyConfigured with an informative error message to make it clear what has happened, and directs the developer to the documentation for using custom user models in django-registration.

• A new validator, HTML5EmailValidator, is included and is applied by default to the email field of RegistrationForm. The HTML5 email address grammar is more restrictive than the RFC grammar, but primarily in disallowing rare and problematic features.

• Support for Python 2 was dropped, as Python 2 is EOL as of 2020-01-01. As a result, support for Django 1.11 (EOL April 2020) was also dropped; the minimum supported Django version is now 2.2.

django-registration 3.0.1

• The custom validators are now serializable.

• Although no code changes were required, this release officially marks itself compatible with Python 3.7 and with django 2.2.

Changes between django-registration 2.x and 3.x

Module renaming

Prior to 3.x, django-registration installed a Python module named registration. To avoid silent incompatibilities, and to conform to more recent best practices, django-registration 3.x now installs a module named django_registration. Attempts to import from the registration module will immediately fail with ImportError.

Many installations will be able to adapt by replacing references to registration with references to django_registration.

Removal of model-based workflow

The two-step model-based signup workflow, which has been present since the first public release of django-registration in 2007, has now been removed. In its place, it is recommended that you use the two-step activation workflow instead, as that workflow requires no server-side storage of additional data beyond the user account itself.

Renaming of two-step activation workflow

The two-step activation workflow was previously found at registration.backends.hmac; it has been renamed and is now found at registration.backends.activation.

Renaming of one-step workflow

The one-step workflow was previously found at registration.backends.simple; it has been renamed and is now found at registration.backends.one_step.

Removal of auth URLs

Prior to 3.x, django-registration’s default URLconf modules for its built-in workflows would attempt to include the Django auth views (login, logout, password reset, etc.) for you. This became untenable with the rewrite of Django’s auth views to be class-based, as it required detecting the set of auth views and choosing a set of URL patterns at runtime.

As a result, auth views are no longer automatically configured for you; if you want them, include() the URLconf django.contrib.auth.urls at a location of your choosing.

Distinguishing activation failure conditions

Prior to 3.x, failures to activate a user account (in workflows which use activation) all simply returned None in place of the activated account. This meant it was not possible to determine, from inspecting the result, what exactly caused the failure.

In django-registration 3.x, activation failures raise an exception – ActivationError – with a message and code (such as “expired”), to indicate the cause of failure. This exception is caught by ActivationView and turned into the template context variable activation_error.

Changes to custom user support

Support for custom user models has been brought more in line with the features Django offers. This affects compatibility of custom user models with django-registration’s default forms and views. In particular, custom user models should now provide, in addition to USERNAME_FIELD, the get_username() and get_email_field_name() methods. See the custom user documentation for details.

Changes to success_url

Both the registration and activation views mimic Django’s own generic views in supporting a choice of ways to specify where to redirect after a successful registration or activation; you can either set the attribute success_url on the view class, or implement the method get_success_url() . However, there is a key difference between the base Django generic-view version of this, and the version in django-registration: when calling a get_success_url() method, django-registration passes the user account as an argument.

This is incompatible with the behavior of Django’s base FormMixin, which expects get_success_url() to take zero arguments.

Also, earlier versions of django-registration allowed success_url and get_success_url() to provide either a string URL, or a tuple of (viewname, args, kwargs) to pass to Django’s reverse() helper, in order to work around issues caused by calling reverse() at the level of a class attribute.

In django-registration 3.x, the user argument to get_success_url() is now optional, meaning FormMixin’s default behavior is now compatible with any get_success_url() implementation that doesn’t require the user object; as a result, implementations which don’t rely on the user object should either switch to specifying success_url as an attribute, or change their own signature to get_success_url(self, user=None).

Also, the ability to supply the 3-tuple of arguments for reverse() has been removed; both success_url and get_success_url() now must be/return either a string, or a lazy object that resolves to a string. To avoid class-level calls to reverse(), use django.urls.reverse_lazy() instead.

Removed “no free email” form

Earlier versions of django-registration included a form class, RegistrationFormNoFreeEmail, which attempted to forbid user signups using common free/throwaway email providers. Since this is a pointless task (the number of possible domains of such providers is ever-growing), this form class has been removed.

Template names

Since django-registration’s Python module has been renamed from registration to django_registration, its default template folder has also been renamed, from registration to django_registration. Additionally, the following templates have undergone name changes:

• The default template name for the body of the activation email in the two-step activation workflow is now django_registration/activation_email_body.txt (previously, it was registration/activation_email.txt)

• The default template name for ActivationView and its subclasses is now django_registration/activation_failed.html (previously, it was registration/activate.html).

Renaming of URL patterns

Prior to 3.x, django-registration’s included URLconf modules provided URL pattern names beginning with “registration”. For example: “registration_register”. In 3.x, these are all renamed to begin with “django_registration”. For example: “django_registration_register”.

Removal of cleanupregistration management command

The “cleanupregistration” management command, and the RegistrationProfile.objects.delete_expired_users() and RegistrationProfile.objects.expired() methods, were removed in django-registration 3.0. Deployments which need a way to identify and delete expired accounts should determine how they wish to do so and implement their own methods for this.

Other changes

The URLconf registration.urls has been removed; it was an alias for the URLconf of the model-based workflow, which has also been removed.

The compatibility alias registration.backends.default, which also pointed to the model-based workflow, has been removed.

Changes during the 2.x release series

One major change occurred between django-registration 2.0 and 2.1: the addition in version 2.1 of the ReservedNameValidator, which is now used by default on RegistrationForm and its subclasses.

This is technically backwards-incompatible, since a set of usernames which previously could be registered now cannot be registered, but was included because the security benefits outweigh the edge cases of the now-disallowed usernames. If you need to allow users to register with usernames forbidden by this validator, see its documentation for notes on how to customize or disable it.

In 2.2, the behavior of the RegistrationProfile.expired() method was clarified to accommodate user expectations; it does not return (and thus, RegistrationProfile.delete_expired_users() does not delete) profiles of users who had successfully activated.

In django-registration 2.3, the new validators validate_confusables() and validate_confusables_email() were added, and are applied by default to the username field and email field, respectively, of registration forms. This may cause some usernames which previously were accepted to no longer be accepted, but like the reserved-name validator this change was made because its security benefits significantly outweigh the edge cases in which it might disallow an otherwise-acceptable username or email address. If for some reason you need to allow registration with usernames or email addresses containing potentially dangerous use of Unicode, you can subclass the registration form and remove these validators, though doing so is not recommended.

Versions prior to 2.0

A 1.0 release of django-registration existed, but the 2.x series was compatible with it.

Prior to 1.0, the most widely-adopted version of django-registration was 0.8; the changes from 0.8 to 2.x were large and significant, and if any installations on 0.8 still exist and wish to upgrade to more recent versions, it is likely the most effective route will be to discard all code using 0.8 and start over from scratch with a 3.x release.