How to automate createsuperuser on django?

Question

I want to auto run manage.py createsuperuser on django but it seams that there is no way of setting a default password.

How can I get this?

Answer 1

I would suggest running a Data Migration, so when migrations are applied to the project, a superuser is created as part of the migrations. The username and password can be setup as environment variables. This is also useful when running an app in a container (see this thread as an example)

Your data migration would then look like this:

import os
from django.db import migrations

class Migration(migrations.Migration):
    dependencies = [
        ('', ''),
    ] # can also be emtpy if it's your first migration

    def generate_superuser(apps, schema_editor):
        from django.contrib.auth.models import User

        DJANGO_DB_NAME = os.environ.get('DJANGO_DB_NAME', "default")
        DJANGO_SU_NAME = os.environ.get('DJANGO_SU_NAME')
        DJANGO_SU_EMAIL = os.environ.get('DJANGO_SU_EMAIL')
        DJANGO_SU_PASSWORD = os.environ.get('DJANGO_SU_PASSWORD')

        superuser = User.objects.create_superuser(
            username=DJANGO_SU_NAME,
            email=DJANGO_SU_EMAIL,
            password=DJANGO_SU_PASSWORD)

        superuser.save()

    operations = [
        migrations.RunPython(generate_superuser),
    ]

Hope that helps!

EDIT: Some might raise the question how to set these environment variables and make Django aware of them. There are a lot of ways and it's been answered in other SO posts, but just as a quick pointer, creating a .env file is a good idea. You could then use the python-dotenv package, but if you have setup a virtual environment with pipenv, it will automatically set the envvars in your .env file. Likewise, running your app via docker-compose can read in your .env file.