It’s sometimes useful to prepopulate your database with hard-coded data when\nyou’re first setting up an app. You can provide initial data with migrations or\nfixtures.
\nTo automatically load initial data for an app, create a\ndata migration. Migrations are run when setting up the\ntest database, so the data will be available there, subject to some\nlimitations.
\nYou can also provide data using fixtures,\nhowever, this data isn’t loaded automatically, except if you use\nTransactionTestCase.fixtures.
A fixture is a collection of data that Django knows how to import into a\ndatabase. The most straightforward way of creating a fixture if you’ve already\ngot some data is to use the manage.py dumpdata command.\nOr, you can write fixtures by hand; fixtures can be written as JSON, XML or YAML\n(with PyYAML installed) documents. The serialization documentation has more details about each of these supported\nserialization formats.
As an example, though, here’s what a fixture for a Person model might look\nlike in JSON:
[\n {\n "model": "myapp.person",\n "pk": 1,\n "fields": {\n "first_name": "John",\n "last_name": "Lennon"\n }\n },\n {\n "model": "myapp.person",\n "pk": 2,\n "fields": {\n "first_name": "Paul",\n "last_name": "McCartney"\n }\n }\n]\nAnd here’s that same fixture as YAML:
\n- model: myapp.person\n pk: 1\n fields:\n first_name: John\n last_name: Lennon\n- model: myapp.person\n pk: 2\n fields:\n first_name: Paul\n last_name: McCartney\nYou’ll store this data in a fixtures directory inside your app.
You can load data by calling manage.py loaddata\n<fixturename>, where <fixturename> is the name of the fixture file\nyou’ve created. Each time you run loaddata, the data will be read\nfrom the fixture and reloaded into the database. Note this means that if you\nchange one of the rows created by a fixture and then run loaddata\nagain, you’ll wipe out any changes you’ve made.
By default, Django looks for fixtures in the fixtures directory inside each\napp for, so the command loaddata sample will find the file\nmy_app/fixtures/sample.json. This works with relative paths as well, so\nloaddata my_app/sample will find the file\nmy_app/fixtures/my_app/sample.json.
Django also looks for fixtures in the list of directories provided in the\nFIXTURE_DIRS setting.
To completely prevent default search form happening, use an absolute path to\nspecify the location of your fixture file, e.g. loaddata /path/to/sample.