I want to start by saying I am fairly new to Django Rest Framework. I have a fully functioning users app built in Django which has user registration, login, logout, password change and password reset all working well. I am trying to replicate these to have their own REST API endpoints using DRF.

I have created a custom user model as shown below. I have written a serializer to handle user registration as shown below. Everything works fine except that the default password validators which are in-built in Django seem to be missing. How can I enable it as it is readily available in settings.py? Any guidance on this would be greatly appreciated.

models.py:

class CustomUser(AbstractBaseUser):
    email = models.EmailField(unique=True, max_length=100)
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=255, blank=True, default='')

serializers.py

class UserRegisterSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    # Define password fields so that text entered is not visible
    password = serializers.CharField(
        style={'input_type': 'password'},
        write_only=True,
        required=True,
    )
    password2 = serializers.CharField(
        style={'input_type': 'password'},
        write_only=True,
        required=True,
    )

    class Meta:
        model = CustomUser
        # Add fields which are to be filled during registration
        fields = ['id', 'email', 'first_name', 'last_name', 'password', 'password2']

    def create(self, validated_data):
        # Create a new user object
        user = CustomUser(
            email=self.validated_data['email'],
            first_name=self.validated_data['first_name'],
            last_name=self.validated_data['last_name'],
        )

        password = self.validated_data['password']
        password2 = self.validated_data['password2']

        # Check if passwords entered are matching. If not, raise error
        if password != password2:
            raise serializers.ValidationError({'password': 'Passwords must match.'})

        # Hash the password before it is saved
        user.set_password(password)
        # Save the user object
        user.save()
        return user

views.py:

class UserRegisterCreateAPIView(CreateAPIView):
    serializer_class = UserRegisterSerializer