Remove (or hide) default Permissions from Django

UPDATE: Django 1.7 supports the customization of default permissions

Original Answer

The following is valid for Django prior to version 1.7

This is standard functionality of the auth contrib application.

It handles the post_syncdb signal and creates the permissions (the standard 3: add, change, delete, plus any custom ones) for each model; they are stored in the auth_permission table in the database.

So, they will be created each time you run the syncdb management command

You have some choices. None is really elegant, but you can consider:

1. Dropping the auth contrib app and provide your own authentication backend.

   Consequences -> you will lose the admin and other custom apps built on top of the auth User model, but if your application is highly customized that could be an option for you

2. Overriding the behaviour of the post_syncdb signal inside the auth app (inside \django\contrib\auth\management__init__.py file)

   Consequences -> be aware that without the basic permissions the Django admin interface won't be able to work (and maybe other things as well).

3. Deleting the basic permissions (add, change, delete) for each model inside the auth_permission table (manually, with a script, or whatever).

   Consequences -> you will lose the admin again, and you will need to delete them each time you run syncdb.

4. Building your own Permission application/system (with your own decorators, middlewares, etc..) or extending the existing one.

   Consequences -> none, if you build it well - this is one of the cleanest solutions in my opinion.

A final consideration: changing the contrib applications or Django framework itself is never considered a good thing: you could break something and you will have hard times if you will need to upgrade to a newer version of Django.

So, if you want to be as clean as possibile, consider rolling your own permission system, or extending the standard one (django-guardian is a good example of an extension to django permissions). It won't take much effort, and you can build it the way it feels right for you, overcoming the limitations of the standard django permission system. And if you do a good work, you could also consider to open source it to enable other people using/improving your solution =)

I struggled with this same problem for a while and I think I've come up with a clean solution. Here's how you hide the permissions for Django's auth app:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
from django import forms
from django.contrib.auth.models import Permission

class MyGroupAdminForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = MyGroup

    permissions = forms.ModelMultipleChoiceField(
        Permission.objects.exclude(content_type__app_label='auth'), 
        widget=admin.widgets.FilteredSelectMultiple(_('permissions'), False))


class MyGroupAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = MyGroupAdminForm
    search_fields = ('name',)
    ordering = ('name',)

admin.site.unregister(Group)
admin.site.register(MyGroup, MyGroupAdmin)

Of course it can easily be modified to hide whatever permissions you want. Let me know if this works for you.