Using Django models in external python script

Question

I was very confused today.

I was trying to use my django app models in my python script.

here is my approach

import os, sys

sys.path.append(         


        

Answer 1

You need to write a custom management command, instead of doing these weird acrobatics.

Create a module called management (in other words, create a directory management and inside it create an empty __init__.py file) inside the directory of any app that you have listed in INSTALLED_APPS. So if you have myapp, you would create:

myapp
 |
 > management
 | | __init__.py
 > models.py
 > views.py

Then in the management directory, create another module commands and in it create a file which is the name of your command; for example my_command.py, like this:

myapp
 |
 > management
 | | __init__.py
 | | commands
 | | | __init__.py
 | | | my_command.py
 > models.py
 > views.py

In my_command.py, write this boilerplate code:

from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand, CommandError
from myapp.models import MyModel

class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = 'Does some magical work'

    def handle(self, *args, **options):
        """ Do your work here """
        self.stdout.write('There are {} things!'.format(MyModel.objects.count()))

Once you save the file, you'll be able to do python manage.py my_command and it will have access to all your models and settings.

If you need to run it as a daemon, Daniel Roseman wrote django-initd which does exactly that. Once you have installed it:

from django.core.management.base import CommandError
from daemon_command import DaemonCommand
from myapp.models import MyModel

class Command(DaemonCommand):
    help = 'Does some magical work'

    def loop_callback(self, *args, **options):
        """ Do your work here """
        self.stdout.write('There are {} things!'.format(MyModel.objects.count()))

Once you have that done from the github readme:

The important parts of such a process are these:

    * it comes up automatically on server startup
    * it logs errors and information to a named location, which is configurable
    * if the process dies, it restarts itself straight away 

[...]

Run the command as normal, but pass one of --start, --stop or --restart to 
work as a daemon. Otherwise, the command will run as a standard application.