Django, request.user is always Anonymous User

You say you've written a custom authentication backend, but in fact what you seem to have written is a complete custom authentication app, which doesn't interface with Django's contrib.auth.

If you want to use a non-relational database for your authentication data, all you need to do is create a class that provides two methods: get_user(user_id) and authenticate(**credentials). See the documentation. Once you have authenticated a user, you simply call Django's normal login methods. There should be no reason to manually set request.user or put anything into the session.

Update after edit That has nothing to do with it. There's no requirement that the user class derives from auth.models.User. You still just need to define a get_user method that will return an instance of your user class.

The request.user is set by the django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware.

Check django/contrib/auth/middleware.py:

class LazyUser(object):
    def __get__(self, request, obj_type=None):
        if not hasattr(request, '_cached_user'):
            from django.contrib.auth import get_user
            request._cached_user = get_user(request)
        return request._cached_user

class AuthenticationMiddleware(object):
    def process_request(self, request):
        request.__class__.user = LazyUser()
        return None

Then look at the get_user function in django/contrib/auth/__init__.py:

def get_user(request):
    from django.contrib.auth.models import AnonymousUser
    try:
        user_id = request.session[SESSION_KEY]
        backend_path = request.session[BACKEND_SESSION_KEY]
        backend = load_backend(backend_path)
        user = backend.get_user(user_id) or AnonymousUser()
    except KeyError:
        user = AnonymousUser()
    return user

Your backend will need to implement the get_user function.

I too have custom authentication backend and always got AnonymousUser after successful authentication and login. I had the get_user method in my backend. What I was missing was that get_user must get the user by pk only, not by email or whatever your credentials in authenticate are:

class AccountAuthBackend(object):

@staticmethod
def authenticate(email=None, password=None):
    try:
        user = User.objects.get(email=email)
        if user.check_password(password):
            return user
    except User.DoesNotExist:
        return None

@staticmethod
def get_user(id_):
    try:
        return User.objects.get(pk=id_) # <-- tried to get by email here
    except User.DoesNotExist:
        return None

Its easy to miss this line in the docs:

The get_user method takes a user_id – which could be a username, database ID or whatever, but has to be the primary key of your User object – and returns a User object.

It so happened that email is not primary key in my schema. Hope this saves somebody some time.

Please elaborate. If you are using a custom user model (which is different from a custom user PROFILE model), then you are basically on your own and the django.contrib.auth framework can not help you with authentication. If you are writing your own authentication system and are not using django.contrib.auth, then you need to turn that off because it seem to be interfering with your system.