Welcome to django-class-fixtures!¶

The purpose of django-class-fixtures is to augment Django’s fixture system, used for loading initial data during manage.py syncdb calls, test data with the TestCase.fixtures iterable, and other types of data with manual invocations of manage.py loaddata.

While still supporting Django’s traditional model serialization formats, django-class-fixtures provides pure Python class-based fixtures. They take the form of model instance definitions in a syntax that is very close to how you’d create new instances with SomeModel.objects.create(**kwargs). The thinking goes: why do fixtures in JSON, XML or YAML, when you could just as well do it all with Python code?

This initial public release, 0.8, only implements the loading of class-based fixtures through a loaddata override. The fixtures have to be created by hand until the release of version 0.9, which brings dumpdata support and is the first version I’d expect anyone besides myself to actually use in real-world projects. See Planned future releases for details on future versions.

Even though 0.8 already has rather decent test coverage, use it at your own risk. The first somewhat safe production version will be 1.0. The standard non-liability clauses in LICENSE.txt apply then as well, of course.

See Getting started for an introduction. After that, check out Using class-based fixtures for some additional information about the capabilities of django-class-fixtures, and some neat tricks that class-based fixtures enable you to pull off.

Good luck!