Django Proxy Model Permissions Do Not Appear

This is fixed in Django 2.2, quoting release notes:

Permissions for proxy models are now created using the content type of the proxy model rather than the content type of the concrete model. A migration will update existing permissions when you run migrate.

and docs:

Proxy models work exactly the same way as concrete models. Permissions are created using the own content type of the proxy model. Proxy models don’t inherit the permissions of the concrete model they subclass.

Turns out I didn't do anything wrong. I was looking for the permissions under

myapp | New Request | Can add new request

Permissions fall under the parent model.

myapp | engagement | Can add new request

This is a known bug in Django: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/11154 (check comments for some patches)

There is a workaround, you can see it here: https://gist.github.com/magopian/7543724

It can vary based on your django version, but the priciple is the same.

Tested with Django 1.10.1

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

"""Add permissions for proxy model.
This is needed because of the bug https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/11154
in Django (as of 1.6, it's not fixed).
When a permission is created for a proxy model, it actually creates if for it's
base model app_label (eg: for "article" instead of "about", for the About proxy
model).
What we need, however, is that the permission be created for the proxy model
itself, in order to have the proper entries displayed in the admin.
"""

from __future__ import unicode_literals, absolute_import, division

import sys

from django.contrib.auth.management import _get_all_permissions
from django.contrib.auth.models import Permission
from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType
from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand
from django.apps import apps
from django.utils.encoding import smart_text

class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = "Fix permissions for proxy models."

    def handle(self, *args, **options):
        for model in apps.get_models():
            opts = model._meta
            ctype, created = ContentType.objects.get_or_create(
                app_label=opts.app_label,
                model=opts.object_name.lower(),
                defaults={'name': smart_text(opts.verbose_name_raw)})

            for codename, name in _get_all_permissions(opts):
                p, created = Permission.objects.get_or_create(
                    codename=codename,
                    content_type=ctype,
                    defaults={'name': name})
                if created:
                    sys.stdout.write('Adding permission {}\n'.format(p))

How to use

• create a directory /myproject/myapp/management/commands
• create the file /myproject/myapp/management/__init__.py
• create the file /myproject/myapp/management/commands/__init__.py
• save the code above into /myproject/myapp/management/commands/fix_permissions.py
• run /manage.py fix_permissions