Over the last several years, I have found the Django fixture system to be pretty good at bootstrapping Django applications with initial data. Recently though, while working on a geospatial application with a fair amount of features I went to

1

loaddata

and got back this:

1	MemoryError: Problem installing fixture 'fixtures/initial_data.json'.

A quick Google search provided a few helpful StackOverflow responses that said to use “database backup tools” in this scenario but didn’t include any information as to how. Here are some notes on how I used

1

pg_dump

to dump and load Django objects when fixtures weren’t an option.

I’ve used

1

pg_dump

quite a bit for backing up databases and exporting tables but in all of those circumstances I wanted to recreate the table, all of its permissions and load all of the data. Of course in the Django world, I expect Django to create all of the tables and handle permissions and constraints. I had never used

1

pg_dump

to simply dump a table’s data and I didn’t know how it would handle things like foreign key constraints that Django’s

1

dumpdata

already abstracts for me.

Turns out

1

pg_dump

can handle it all. After a couple of attempts, here is what I came up with:

pg_dump <db_name> -t <table_name> -O -a --disable-triggers > fixture.sql

An explanation on the options:

1

-t

Specifies the table name. If you are using abstract classes, be sure you fully understand how your models are represented in the database and include the base tables that your objects may be stored on.

Note: You can provide multiple tables in a single dump by adding additional

1

-t

parameters.

1

-O

No owner. This gives ownership of all of the objects to the user executing the

1

psql

import.

1

-a

Dumps only the data.

1	--disable-triggers

This handy feature will temporarily disable triggers on the target tables while your data is being loaded, once the import is done, the triggers will be re-enabled. This is necessary if you have data sets that have foreign key constraints either through abstract classes or through the various relationships that Django supports.

To load the fixture into your application execute:

psql <db_name> < fixture.sql

As a Django administrator, I often have to create user accounts for a demo or training session. Below is a small script that can be run from the Django shell to create users in batch.

import sys
from django.contrib.auth import authenticate
from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model

User = get_user_model()

#  Update the users in this list.
#  Each tuple represents the username, password, and email of a user.
users = [
    ('user_1', 'phgzHpXcnJ', 'user_1@example.com'),
    ('user_2', 'ktMmqKcpJw', 'user_2@example.com'),
]

for username, password, email in users:
    try:
        print 'Creating user {0}.'.format(username)
        user = User.objects.create_user(username=username, email=email)
        user.set_password(password)
        user.save()

        assert authenticate(username=username, password=password)
        print 'User {0} successfully created.'.format(username)

    except:
        print 'There was a problem creating the user: {0}.  Error: {1}.' \
            .format(username, sys.exc_info()[1])