Users & access#

Searpa is login-only with no public registration, so as the administrator you control who has an account. This is what keeps an instance private to your users.

Creating accounts#

Create users with Django’s standard management command:

# Docker
docker exec -it <container> python manage.py createsuperuser

# From source
make superuser

createsuperuser makes an admin account; for ordinary users you can create them the same way (or from the Django admin once you have a superuser). Each account needs a username and password; an email is optional (see below).

Email is optional#

A user account doesn’t require an email address. Its only use is password reset:

With an email, the user can reset a forgotten password via the Forgot password? flow (requires email to be configured).
Without one, a forgotten password is unrecoverable by the user, you’d reset it for them with manage.py changepassword <username>.

Resetting a password as admin#

docker exec -it <container> python manage.py changepassword <username>

Configuring password-reset email#

For self-service password resets to work, set the EMAIL_* variables to a real SMTP server, see Configuration → Email. Without an SMTP server, simply create accounts and hand out passwords directly, and reset them with changepassword when needed.

There is no sign-up page to disable or rate-limit, the absence of public registration is built in. Onboarding a user is always a deliberate admin action.