Fixtures

Links

django-fixture-magic Utilities to extract and manipulate Django Fixtures
Natural keys

Fixture

Automatically loading initial data fixtures

From Automatically loading initial data fixtures, If you create a fixture named initial_data.json, that fixture will be loaded every time you run syncdb. This is extremely convenient, but be careful: remember that the data will be refreshed every time you run syncdb. So don’t use initial_data.json for data you’ll want to edit.

Create

Note: Probably best to use Natural keys (I will update the notes when I have time).

To create a fixture (assuming you have data in your database):

Copy the output of the following command to a temporary file:

django-admin.py dumpdata product --indent 4 > ~/temp/temp.json
django-admin.py dumpdata --indent=4 --natural --format=yaml product
django-admin.py dumpdata --indent=4 --natural --format=yaml auth

Note:

product is the name of the application. For users, the application is auth.
--indent will pretty print the JSON (with 4 character indents).
--traceback will give useful error messages allowing you to diagnose Error: Unable to serialize database.

Create a fixtures folder inside your application:

mkdir product/fixtures/

Note: No need to create an __init__.py file inside this folder.

Copy the temporary file to the fixtures folder, checking the contents and giving it a nice name e.g. product.json.

In your test class, add the file-name to the list of fixtures e.g:

class SimpleTest(TestCase):
    fixtures = ['product.json',]

    def test_...

Issues

Make sure you have included the application which contains the fixture file in your settings.py file.
Make sure to declare the fixtures attribute before any test_ functions.
If the fixture file doesn’t exist… then the test will continue without complaining… To solve the problem, create the fixture file.
Make sure you are using django.test import TestCase… as some of the other Django test classes do not work with fixtures.