When developing applications in Django, the need might arise to customize the user model. Specifically, you might want to create different types of users. In my case, I’m interested in creating a person user and a kit user. A person user can own multiple kit users, and both need to be able to authenticate to access an API. Luckily, Django’s authentication system is very flexible, and there are multiple ways to achieve this goal.

The standard way to implement this is to stick with the default user model, django.contrib.auth.models.User, and create a complex user profile. The profile adds the desired fields and behaviors for the various user types in a new model, and links to the model through a field reference. This can get fairly complex quickly. It is especially difficult to express ownership of kits by users, without allowing ownership of users by users. Here, we will see how we can implement this using inheritance. The code samples are for Django 1.11.

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