Django — Easily save your model instances with dumpdata and loaddata

So I’ve always wanted to know how to write the XML fixtures for automatically loading my project db with initial data, but I always thought I’d have to learn something so I stayed away and simply entered test data by hand.

Boy was I wrong.

I had to manually write shipping tables for several shipping categories / states and state tax rates so I wanted them in a fixture I could simply load into django anywhere else.

Turns out it is amazingly easy.

Note: I previously used format=xml in this example but I’ve since switched to json (the default) because I was getting parser errors when I tried to loaddata the xml files

python manage.py dumpdata --indent=4 > shipping_fixture.json

python manage.py dumpdata
dumps all of your apps. add your app afterwards to dump only one piece.

Notice the command simply has a long output and no options to save it to a file somewhere. That’s where you use > to specify a file to write the data to.

–indent=4 just adds indentation because the default writes all data at the beginning of the line.

python manage.py loaddata shipping_fixture.json will load your data. You can also add a default fixtures setting in settings.py to have commands like manage.py flush delete the db & repopulate with your fixture.

Great stuff.. who knew it would be so freaking easy.