See https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#django.contrib.auth.models.CustomUser.User.REQUIRED_FIELDS https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/a

See https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#django.contrib.auth.models.CustomUser.User.REQUIRED_FIELDS https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/#django.co... The quick version is that it's not duplicating behavior, the documentation is simply still undergoing work. We'll try and make it a bit more clear in the days to come. The long version is that during user creation sometimes you have fields that for whatever reason are not required by the database but are required for the user to enter in. This is because user creation is often more complex than it seems on the surface, and there is already existing django.contrib.auth.views that need this sort of configuration. REQUIRED_FIELDS gives you the control to force the user to enter data while not not altering the database. Is it ideal? Not really. But having dealt with user creation through email, OAuth, OpenID, LDAP, SOAP, and worse, having this as a configurable setting is better than an auto-magic introspection. Finally, I'll return to the documentation issue. I'm officially duly noting that the documentation on this feature needs work. I've opened ticket #19402 to address this issue. See https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/19402 https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/19402