Providing initial data for models

If you want to automatically load initial data for an app, create a . Migrations are run when setting up the test database, so the data will be available there, subject to some limitations.

Providing data with fixtures

You can also provide data using fixtures, however, this data isn’t loaded automatically, except if you use .

A fixture is a collection of data that Django knows how to import into a database. The most straightforward way of creating a fixture if you’ve already got some data is to use the manage.py dumpdata command. Or, you can write fixtures by hand; fixtures can be written as JSON, XML or YAML (with installed) documents. The serialization documentation has more details about each of these supported .

And here’s that same fixture as YAML:

  pk: 1
  fields:
    first_name: John
- model: myapp.person
  pk: 2
  fields:
    last_name: McCartney

You’ll store this data in a fixtures directory inside your app.

You can load data by calling <fixturename>, where <fixturename> is the name of the fixture file you’ve created. Each time you run , the data will be read from the fixture and re-loaded into the database. Note this means that if you change one of the rows created by a fixture and then run loaddata again, you’ll wipe out any changes you’ve made.

When running , you can also specify a path to a fixture file, which overrides searching the usual directories.