Django Allauth Fails in Development Environment

[UPstartDeveloper]

Tinydoor seems unable to sign up or login new users when it's running on localhost. I have also tried to create a superuser and then send a Forgot Password email, and this function also causes the app to crash in the development environment.

The error that's shown in the debug pages is:

ConnectionRefusedError at <URL path>
[Errno 61] Connection refused

These functions do work on the deployed website, my hunch is that we may just need to set up the same tools (such as Mailhog) to work on the local version. I will look more into this, it seems like a common issue on the django-allauth repo, as indicated by the discussion on this issue.

[UPstartDeveloper]

Hey team! Good news!

The Fix

To fix this I am going to switch the EMAIL_BACKEND setting from defaulting to the SMTP setting, to just printing the message to the console.

The Explanation

So as @scuerda mentions on the issue I linked above, a simple fix to this bug is to set

EMAIL_BACKEND = env('DJANGO_EMAIL_BACKEND', default='django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend')

This setting will print the email message that new users receive to confirm their email, on the console where you're running python manage.py runserver. These messages are the same as if we actually sent an email, so the links are perfectly functional!

On line 218 of the config/settings/base.py file, we have already set the email backend to SMTP, however, that's not what's used in production if I understand correctly, Mailgun is. So it doesn't really serve any purpose.

I will be changing this:

217          EMAIL_BACKEND = env(
218               "DJANGO_EMAIL_BACKEND", default="django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend"
219          )

to this:

217          EMAIL_BACKEND = env(
218               "DJANGO_EMAIL_BACKEND", default="django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend"
219          )

So hopefully this will make it easier for us to work with auth in development going further, especially when it comes to building the dashboard. Cheers!