Django 6 Cheatsheet

Setup

• Create a virtual environment — Create an isolated environment for the project's packages.
• Install Django — Install Django into the active virtual environment.
• Check the Django version — Print the installed Django version.
• Create a project — Create a project in the current folder, so manage.py sits next to your repository root.
• Create an app — Create a new app inside the project. Add it to INSTALLED_APPS afterwards.
• Start the development server — Run the app at http://127.0.0.1:8000 with auto-reload.
• Change the address and port — Listen on all interfaces on port 8080.

Database and migrations

• Create migrations — Generate migration files from changes to your models.
• Apply migrations — Apply pending migrations to the database.
• List migrations — Show every migration and whether it has been applied.
• See a migration's SQL — Print the SQL a migration would run, without running it.
• Roll back to an earlier migration — Unapply migrations after the named one. Use zero to unapply all of an app's migrations.
• Open the database shell — Open psql, mysql or sqlite3 using the settings in DATABASES.
• Generate models from an existing database — Print model classes for tables in an existing database.
• Export data as JSON — Write an app's data to a fixture file.
• Import a fixture — Load data from a fixture file into the database.
• Delete all data — Remove all data from the database and re-run post-migrate setup.

Users and shell

• Create an admin user — Create a superuser who can sign in to /admin/.
• Change a user's password — Set a new password for a user, prompting for it.
• Open the Django shell — Start a Python shell with your project loaded.

Testing and checks

• Run the tests — Run every test in the project.
• Run one test — Run a single test method by its dotted path.
• Run tests in parallel — Use one process per CPU core.
• Reuse the test database — Keep the test database between runs to save time.
• Check the project for problems — Run Django's system checks.
• Check deployment settings — Run the extra security and production checks.

Static files and deployment

• Collect static files — Copy static files into STATIC_ROOT for the web server to serve.
• Generate a secret key — Print a new random value for SECRET_KEY.
• See changed settings — Show settings that differ from Django's defaults.
• Run with Gunicorn — Serve the project with a production WSGI server.

ORM queries

• Create a row — Insert a new object into the database.
• Get one object — Fetch a single object. It raises DoesNotExist or MultipleObjectsReturned otherwise.
• Filter and sort — Get published posts, newest first.
• Search with a lookup — Find posts whose title contains a word, ignoring case.
• Update many rows — Update all matching rows with one query.
• Delete rows — Delete all matching rows.
• Avoid N+1 queries — Fetch a foreign key in the same query. Use prefetch_related for many-to-many and reverse relations.
• Count related objects — Add a count of comments to each post.

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