Templates#

Introduction#

The templates that are offered out of the box are intentionally plain and without any styling. We do not want to pick a side in the multitudes of frontend styling options out there, and the look and feel typically should be adjusted to match the branding of your project. Therefore it is recommended that you copy all templates over to your own project and adjust them as you see fit.

Having said that, over time the years the complexity of authentication grew considerably. For example, with features such as third party account providers and two-factor authentication adjusting the templates involves a lot more than just styling a login.html and a signup.html template. Therefore, a mechanism is included that allows you to adjust the look and feel of all templates by only overriding a few core templates. This approach allows you to achieve visual results fast, but is of course more limited compared to styling all templates yourself.

Overriding the Built-In Templates#

The allauth app includes all templates, and can be found in the allauth/templates directory. When allauth is part of your INSTALLED_APPS, and "APP_DIRS": True is configured, Django will be able to find its templates. As DIRS is searched before APP_DIRS, overriding the templates involves adding an entry to DIRS that points to your a project specific template folder, as follows:

from pathlib import Path

BASE_DIR = Path(__file__).resolve().parent.parent

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        "BACKEND": "django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates",
        "DIRS": [
            BASE_DIR / "templates"
        ],
        "APP_DIRS": True,
        "OPTIONS": {
            "context_processors": [
                "django.template.context_processors.debug",
                "django.template.context_processors.request",
                "django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth",
                "django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages",
            ],
        },
    },
]

If you copy over all templates to your BASE_DIR / "templates" it should contain these entries (a.o.):

  • An account folder containing the templates from the allauth.account app.

  • A socialaccount folder containing the templates from the allauth.socialaccount app.

  • A mfa folder containing the templates from the allauth.mfa app.

  • An allauth folder containing the overall styling templates (see the next section).

Styling the Existing Templates#

Instead of copying all templates, a mechanism is included that allows you to adjust the look and feel of all templates by only overriding a few core templates. This approach allows you to achieve visual results fast, but is of course more limited compared to styling all templates yourself.

The built-in templates do not render headings, buttons or forms directly. So, you will not find this:

<h1>Welcome</h1>

Instead, the above is rendered using:

{% load allauth %}
{% element h1 %}Welcome{% endelement %}

The {% element h1 %} template tag results in allauth/elements/h1.html being rendered. Here, you can decide to render the h1 heading using as you see fit:

{% load allauth %}
<div class="myproject-h1" style="font-size: 3rem">
    {% slot default %}{% endslot %}
</div>