So I've looked at the documentation, as well as this SO question, and the django-seed package, but none of these seem to fit what I'm trying to do.
Basically, I want to programmatically seed my Games model from an external API, but all the information I can find seems to be reliant on generating a fixture first, which seems like an unnecessary step.
For example, in Ruby/Rails you can write directly to seed.rb and seed the database in anyway that's desired.
If a similar functionality available in Django, or do I need to generate the fixture first from the API, and then import it?
You can use a data migration for this. First create an empty migration for your app:
$ python manage.py makemigrations yourappname --empty
In your empty migration, create a function to load your data and add a migrations.RunPython operation. Here's a modified version of the one from the Django documentation on migrations:
from __future__ import unicode_literals
from django.db import migrations
def stream_from_api():
...
def load_data(apps, schema_editor):
# We can't import the Person model directly as it may be a newer
# version than this migration expects. We use the historical version.
Person = apps.get_model('yourappname', 'Person')
for item in stream_from_api():
person = Person(first=item['first'], last=item['last'], age=item['age'])
person.save()
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
dependencies = [('yourappname', '0009_something')]
operations = [migrations.RunPython(load_data)]
If you have a lot of simple data, you might benefit from the bulk-creation methods:
from __future__ import unicode_literals
from django.db import migrations
def stream_from_api():
...
def load_data(apps, schema_editor):
# We can't import the Person model directly as it may be a newer
# version than this migration expects. We use the historical version.
Person = apps.get_model('yourappname', 'Person')
def stream_people():
for item in stream_from_api():
yield Person(first=item['first'], last=item['last'], age=item['age'])
# Adjust (or remove) the batch size depending on your needs.
# You won't be able to use this method if your objects depend on one-another
Person.objects.bulk_create(stream_people(), batch_size=10000)
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
dependencies = [('yourappname', '0009_something')]
operations = [migrations.RunPython(load_data)]
Migrations have the added benefit of being automatically enclosed in a transaction, so you can stop the migration at any time and it won't leave your database in an inconsistent state.