I'm working on a project that is using Django and South for migrations. I would like to set up some fixtures that would be used to populate the database in some environments (development, demo) but not in others (production). For example, I would like there to be some data in the system so the UI developer has something to work with in the interface they are working on or so we can quickly do a demo for a project manager without having to manually set things up via the admin interface.
While I have found plenty of ways to separate automated testing fixtures from regular fixtures, I have not been able to find anything about loading fixtures based on environment. Is this possible, or is there another way people solve this problem I'm overlooking?
There's not much you can do about initial_data fixtures. However, I've always felt those has less than optimal utility anyways. Rarely do you want the same fixture applied again and again with every call to syncdb or migrate.
If you're using some differently named fixture, you can easily cause it to run with your migration by adding the following to your forwards migration (from the South docs)
from django.core.management import call_command
call_command("loaddata", "my_fixture.json")
So really, all you need is some way to only do that in certain environments. For dev, the easiest path would be to simply rely on DEBUG. So, the previous code becomes:
from django.conf import settings
from django.core.management import call_command
if settings.DEBUG:
call_command("loaddata", "dev_fixture.json")
If you need greater control, you can create some sort of setting that will be different in each local_settings.py (or whatever methodology you use to customize settings based on environment). For example:
# local_settings.py
ENV = 'staging'
# migration
from django.conf import settings
from django.core.management import call_command
if settings.ENV == 'staging':
call_command("loaddata", "staging_fixture.json")