Snippet to load stuff quickly in the Django shell


Sometimes you end up testing out things a lot using the handy django shell, but every time you've got to repeat the same commands to load all the necessary models, utils etc. etc.

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In order to do this automatically, I thought you had to modify the django-admin.py file or something like that. Nope! Here's a useful django snippet that shows how to do the job. Basically - it's very simple (I actually don't understand how I got stuck on something so obvious!), just put evetyhing you want to load  in a separate file in your project, and then load that file from the shell ;-)

E.g..

''' Allows for a quick startup loading commonly used classes, installed apps, and console utils. To use: After manage.py shell, enter from project.package.modulename import * '''

from django.conf import settings from django.db import connection, models

# Load each installed app and put models into the global namespace. for app in models.get_apps(): exec("from %s import *" % app.__name__)

def last_query(): "Show the last query performed." return connection.queries[-1]

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# Add commonly used modules, classes, functions here

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from django import forms import os from datetime import datetime

# etc. etc.

p.s. also snippets 540 and 549 provide alternative solutions to the problem!

Cite this blog post:


Michele Pasin. Snippet to load stuff quickly in the Django shell. Blog post on www.michelepasin.org. Published on May 27, 2009.

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