Populate Django database

Question

I'm developing a Django application which stores user information like their address, phone number, name, etc.

I've worked with PHP's Faker library and the seeder included with Laravel. I had been able to populate the database with fake data but now I'm working with Django.

I'd like to populate my users table with around 200 entries. But, I don't want the entries to be random strings. I want it to be fake data like I can get with Laravel. I don't know how to do it.

What do I need to do to persist fake data?

This is for showing the end user the application with some entries so he can see statistics and other things. The data will need to stay in the database. I tried using unit tests but that deletes the database after the unit test ends.

Thanks!

Answer 1

To get it done in a nice way you'll need a combination of Factory Boy, Faker and custom management commands.

Factory Boy allows you to create templates for producing valid objects and Faker generates fake data.

When you install Factory Boy, pip install factory_boy, you also get Faker.

Given,

from django.db import models


class User(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=64)
    address = models.CharField(max_length=128)
    phone_number = models.CharField(max_length=32)

You can define a Factory as follows:

import factory  
import factory.django

class UserFactory(factory.django.DjangoModelFactory):  
    class Meta:
        model = User

    name = factory.Faker('name')
    address = factory.Faker('address')
    phone_number = factory.Faker('phone_number')

Then, you can create fake users by calling UserFactory.create().

One way to get your 200 fake users would be to jump into the shell, python manage.py shell, and do:

 >>> # import UserFactory here
 >>> for _ in range(200):
 ...     UserFactory.create()

Another way, which can give you a lot more flexibility, is to create a custom management command.

For example, create seed.py (this will be the management command name) in the directory <yourapp>/management/commands (to have it discovered by Django) with the following:

# <yourapp>/management/commands/seed.py
from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand

# import UserFactory here


class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = 'Seeds the database.'

    def add_arguments(self, parser):
        parser.add_argument('--users',
            default=200,
            type=int,
            help='The number of fake users to create.')

    def handle(self, *args, **options):
        for _ in range(options['users']):
            UserFactory.create()

And, you'd run it via the command-line with python manage.py seed or python manage.py seed --users 50 for example.