django-longerusernameandemail provides a migration and a monkeypatch to make the Django auth.user username and email fields longer, instead of the arbitrarily short 30 and 75 characters. It's designed to be a simple include-and-forget project that makes a little headache go away. Enjoy, and pull requests welcome!

Note that Django 1.5 or newer already includes support for custom User models (read this tutorial and the official documentation about Substituting a custom User model). So, you only need django-longerusernameandemail if you use an older Django version, or if you don't want to create your own User model for some reason.

Also note that:

• in Django 1.8 email length increased to 254 characters
• in Django 1.10 username length increased to 150 characters.

Usage

Step 1. Install django-longerusernameandemail.

• pip install django-longerusernameandemail

You will also need to install south to use the migration.

• pip install south

Step 2. Add longerusernameandemail to your installed apps.

Add 'longerusernameandemail' to the top of your INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py

settings.py

INSTALLED_APPS = ("longerusernameandemail",) + INSTALLED_APPS

Step 3. (Optional) Specify a custom username length, or other settings.

If you want custom behavior, you can specify the following in settings.py

settings.py

MAX_USERNAME_LENGTH = 100  # optional, default is 255.
MAX_EMAIL_LENGTH = 50  # optional, default is 255.
REQUIRE_UNIQUE_EMAIL = False  # optional, default is True

Step 4. Run the migration

$ python manage.py migrate longerusernameandemail

That's it, you should be good to go!

Notes about the built-in forms

This app also automatically monkey patches the User forms in the Django admin to remove the 30 character limit.

It provides a suitable replacement for the standard AuthenticationForm as well, but due to the implementation you must manually utilize it.

urls.py

from longerusernameandemail.forms import AuthenticationForm

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    # ...
    (r'^accounts/login/$', 'django.contrib.auth.views.login', {'authentication_form': AuthenticationForm}),
)

Credits

The monkeypatch for this is very largely based on celement's answer on stackoverflow