Provisioning a superuser

A clean installation of Open Zaak has no existing data, it’s up to the service provider and/or the users to set up Open Zaak to your liking.

To be able to do anything in the Open Zaak admin interface, you need a user account with sufficient permissions, typically a superuser. Open Zaak has a couple of mechanisms to create this superuser.

Creating a superuser manually

Superusers can be created through the Command Line Interface (CLI) built into Open Zaak, for example:

python src/manage.py createinitialsuperuser \
    --username admin \
    --password admin \
    --email admin@gemeente.nl \
    --no-input

This will create the user if it does not exist yet. If the user already exists (based on username), nothing happens.

You can get detailed information by getting the built-in help:

python src/manage.py createinitialsuperuser --help

Note

Instead of providing the password as an argument, you can also use an environment variable DJANGO_SUPERUSER_PASSWORD or use the flag --generate-password. Generated passwords are e-mailed to the configured e-mail address.

Creating a superuser as part of the (initial) deployment

It’s possible to automatically provision a superuser as part of your regular deployment, be it on Kubernetes, Docker or Podman or any other way. Behind the scenes, the createinitialsuperuser management command is executed (see Command Line Interface (CLI) for more details).

To opt in to this behaviour, you must specify the following environment variables:

• OPENZAAK_SUPERUSER_USERNAME: username of the superuser account to create. If the account already exists, nothing will happen.

• OPENZAAK_SUPERUSER_EMAIL: e-mail address of the superuser account. Has a default value of admin@admin.org.

The DJANGO_SUPERUSER_PASSWORD environment variable is optional, if provided, this is the password that will be set for the superuser account.

The superuser will be created on container start-up, before the web-server starts.