Go – Fixing the auth_permission table after renaming a model in Django

The least painful and indeed Django-recommended way of doing this is through a OneToOneField(User) property.

Extending the existing User model

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If you wish to store information related to User, you can use a one-to-one relationship to a model containing the fields for additional information. This one-to-one model is often called a profile model, as it might store non-auth related information about a site user.

That said, extending django.contrib.auth.models.User and supplanting it also works...

Substituting a custom User model

Some kinds of projects may have authentication requirements for which Django’s built-in User model is not always appropriate. For instance, on some sites it makes more sense to use an email address as your identification token instead of a username.

[Ed: Two warnings and a notification follow, mentioning that this is pretty drastic.]

I would definitely stay away from changing the actual User class in your Django source tree and/or copying and altering the auth module.

Django versions 1.8 and later:

You should use get_fields():

[f.name for f in MyModel._meta.get_fields()]

The get_all_field_names() method is deprecated starting from Django 1.8 and will be removed in 1.10.

The documentation page linked above provides a fully backwards-compatible implementation of get_all_field_names(), but for most purposes the previous example should work just fine.

Django versions before 1.8:

model._meta.get_all_field_names()

That should do the trick.

That requires an actual model instance. If all you have is a subclass of django.db.models.Model, then you should call myproject.myapp.models.MyModel._meta.get_all_field_names()