If you need to extend the username model, please instead use the more maintained fork https://github.com/madssj/django-longer-username-and-email, or Django 1.5+'s custom user models.

This project is officially no longer supported in light of those two superior options.

django-longer-username provides a migration and a monkeypatch to make the Django auth.user username field longer, instead of the arbitrarily short 30 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-longer-username if you use an older Django version, or if you don't want to create your own User model for some reason.

• pip install longerusername

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

• pip install south

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

settings.py

INSTALLED_APPS = ("longerusername",) + INSTALLED_APPS

If you want to specify a custom length, add it to settings.py. The default is 255 characters.

settings.py

MAX_USERNAME_LENGTH = 100  # optional, default is 255.

$ python manage.py migrate longerusername

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

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 longerusername.forms import AuthenticationForm

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

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