Prefer data migrations to initial data

Django provides several mechanisms for loading initial data for models, such as leveraging JSON fixtures or files of raw SQL - James Bennett offers a good overview.

Each documented method involves initialising data as part of the syncdb event, either by loading a fixture file or by hooking into the syncdb signal. However, there is a serious pitfall with these techniques, as described in the Django docs:

This is extremely convenient, but be careful: remember that the data will be refreshed every time you run syncdb. So don’t use initial_data for data you’ll want to edit.

Storing data in a database that you don’t want to edit seems like an anti-pattern to me. If it never changes, a database probably isn’t the right place to store it.

That aside, there are certainly times when you want to seed a new database with data that can be edited. In these circumstances, the documented methods fall down as you can accidentally clobber live data if you run syncdb again.

You might argue that you should only run syncdb once but in my experience, it is useful to run syncdb as part of your deployment script so that any newly added apps have their tables created automatically.

South data migrations

A better way to provide initial data is to use the database migration library South to create data migrations. The advantages are:

Data migrations will only run once and so they won’t clobber any data.
They will run automatically in all environments - no manual deployment steps required.

The only disadvantage is that you need to use South, which most sensible Django projects already do.

Simple example

Create a blank data migration:

./manage.py datamigration myapp mymigrationname

then implement the forward method to create the appropriate initial data:

def forwards(self, orm):
    for name in ('Foo', 'Bar'):
        orm.Frob.objects.create(name=name)

See the worked example in South’s docs for further details on writing data migrations.

Using fixture files

It’s possible to use JSON fixture files with data migrations, by utilising the call_command function.

def forwards(self, orm):
    from django.core.management import call_command
    call_command('loaddata', 'countries.json')

I had thought this was very useful feature as you can use the dumpdata command to produce your initial fixtures, and you will have them available to be used by unit tests.