I’ve been thinking about deployment for my app these last few days and one of the things I needed to be able to do is automatically load initial data to one of the tables. If you’re already using South (which you should be unless you have a very, very simple project), you can easily include this in a data migration by loading in a fixture.

You can accomplish this in a few simple steps:

1. Export the data from the table to a JSON file, you can use a Django dumpdata command to do this. For example:

python manage.py dumpdata glucoses.category –settings=settings.local > fixtures/initial_glucoses_category_data.json

2. Create a migration. For example:

python manage.py datamigration glucoses load_categoryfixture –settings=settings.local

3. Edit the migration file so the forwards method looks something like this:

class Migration(DataMigration):

    def forwards(self, orm):
        from django.core.management import call_command
        call_command("loaddata",
                     "fixtures/initial_glucoses_category_data.json")

That’s it, you’re done! Now when you deploy your app to a new environment with a new database and run the South migration, the table will be populated with your fixture automatically at the correct time.

More information here: http://south.readthedocs.org/en/latest/fixtures.html