Applications can register their own actions with manage.py. For example, you might want to add a manage.py action for a Django app that you’re distributing. In this document, we will be building a custom closepoll command for the polls application from the tutorial.
To do this, just add a management/commands directory to the application. Django will register a manage.py command for each Python module in that directory whose name doesn’t begin with an underscore. For example:
polls/
__init__.py
models.py
management/
__init__.py
commands/
__init__.py
_private.py
closepoll.py
tests.py
views.py
On Python 2, be sure to include __init__.py files in both the management and management/commands directories as done above or your command will not be detected.
In this example, the closepoll command will be made available to any project that includes the polls application in INSTALLED_APPS.
The _private.py module will not be available as a management command.
The closepoll.py module has only one requirement – it must define a class Command that extends BaseCommand or one of its subclasses.
Standalone scripts
Custom management commands are especially useful for running standalone scripts or for scripts that are periodically executed from the UNIX crontab or from Windows scheduled tasks control panel.
To implement the command, edit polls/management/commands/closepoll.py to look like this:
from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand, CommandError
from polls.models import Poll
class Command(BaseCommand):
args = '<poll_id poll_id ...>'
help = 'Closes the specified poll for voting'
def handle(self, *args, **options):
for poll_id in args:
try:
poll = Poll.objects.get(pk=int(poll_id))
except Poll.DoesNotExist:
raise CommandError('Poll "%s" does not exist' % poll_id)
poll.opened = False
poll.save()
self.stdout.write('Successfully closed poll "%s"' % poll_id)
Note
When you are using management commands and wish to provide console output, you should write to self.stdout and self.stderr, instead of printing to stdout and stderr directly. By using these proxies, it becomes much easier to test your custom command. Note also that you don’t need to end messages with a newline character, it will be added automatically, unless you specify the ending parameter:
self.stdout.write("Unterminated line", ending='')
The new custom command can be called using python manage.py closepoll <poll_id>.
The handle() method takes zero or more poll_ids and sets poll.opened to False for each one. If the user referenced any nonexistent polls, a CommandError is raised. The poll.opened attribute does not exist in the tutorial and was added to polls.models.Poll for this example.
The same closepoll could be easily modified to delete a given poll instead of closing it by accepting additional command line options. These custom options must be added to option_list like this:
from optparse import make_option
class Command(BaseCommand):
option_list = BaseCommand.option_list + (
make_option('--delete',
action='store_true',
dest='delete',
default=False,
help='Delete poll instead of closing it'),
)
def handle(self, *args, **options):
# ...
if options['delete']:
poll.delete()
# ...
The option (delete in our example) is available in the options dict parameter of the handle method. See the optparse Python documentation for more about make_option usage.
In addition to being able to add custom command line options, all management commands can accept some default options such as --verbosity and --traceback.
By default, the BaseCommand.execute() method sets the hardcoded ‘en-us’ locale because some commands shipped with Django perform several tasks (for example, user-facing content rendering and database population) that require a system-neutral string language (for which we use ‘en-us’).
If, for some reason, your custom management command needs to use a fixed locale different from ‘en-us’, you should manually activate and deactivate it in your handle() or handle_noargs() method using the functions provided by the I18N support code:
from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand, CommandError
from django.utils import translation
class Command(BaseCommand):
...
can_import_settings = True
def handle(self, *args, **options):
# Activate a fixed locale, e.g. Russian
translation.activate('ru')
# Or you can activate the LANGUAGE_CODE # chosen in the settings:
#
#from django.conf import settings
#translation.activate(settings.LANGUAGE_CODE)
# Your command logic here
# ...
translation.deactivate()
Another need might be that your command simply should use the locale set in settings and Django should be kept from forcing it to ‘en-us’. You can achieve it by using the BaseCommand.leave_locale_alone option.
When working on the scenarios described above though, take into account that system management commands typically have to be very careful about running in non-uniform locales, so you might need to:
Information on how to test custom management commands can be found in the testing docs.
The base class from which all management commands ultimately derive.
Use this class if you want access to all of the mechanisms which parse the command-line arguments and work out what code to call in response; if you don’t need to change any of that behavior, consider using one of its subclasses.
Subclassing the BaseCommand class requires that you implement the handle() method.
All attributes can be set in your derived class and can be used in BaseCommand’s subclasses.
A string listing the arguments accepted by the command, suitable for use in help messages; e.g., a command which takes a list of application names might set this to ‘<app_label app_label ...>’.
A boolean indicating whether the command needs to be able to import Django settings; if True, execute() will verify that this is possible before proceeding. Default value is True.
A short description of the command, which will be printed in the help message when the user runs the command python manage.py help <command>.
This is the list of optparse options which will be fed into the command’s OptionParser for parsing arguments.
A boolean indicating whether the command outputs SQL statements; if True, the output will automatically be wrapped with BEGIN; and COMMIT;. Default value is False.
A boolean; if True, the entire Django project will be checked for potential problems prior to executing the command. If requires_system_checks is missing, the value of requires_model_validation is used. If the latter flag is missing as well, the default value (True) is used. Defining both requires_system_checks and requires_model_validation will result in an error.
Deprecated since version 1.7: Replaced by requires_system_checks
A boolean; if True, validation of installed models will be performed prior to executing the command. Default value is True. To validate an individual application’s models rather than all applications’ models, call validate() from handle().
A boolean indicating whether the locale set in settings should be preserved during the execution of the command instead of being forcibly set to ‘en-us’.
Default value is False.
Make sure you know what you are doing if you decide to change the value of this option in your custom command if it creates database content that is locale-sensitive and such content shouldn’t contain any translations (like it happens e.g. with django.contrib.auth permissions) as making the locale differ from the de facto default ‘en-us’ might cause unintended effects. See the Management commands and locales section above for further details.
This option can’t be False when the can_import_settings option is set to False too because attempting to set the locale needs access to settings. This condition will generate a CommandError.
The leave_locale_alone option was added in Django 1.6.
BaseCommand has a few methods that can be overridden but only the handle() method must be implemented.
Implementing a constructor in a subclass
If you implement __init__ in your subclass of BaseCommand, you must call BaseCommand’s __init__.
class Command(BaseCommand):
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(Command, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
# ...
Returns the Django version, which should be correct for all built-in Django commands. User-supplied commands can override this method to return their own version.
Tries to execute this command, performing system checks if needed (as controlled by the requires_system_checks attribute). If the command raises a CommandError, it’s intercepted and printed to stderr.
Calling a management command in your code
execute() should not be called directly from your code to execute a command. Use call_command instead.
The actual logic of the command. Subclasses must implement this method.
Uses the system check framework to inspect the entire Django project for potential problems. Serious problems are raised as a CommandError; warnings are output to stderr; minor notifications are output to stdout.
If app_configs and tags are both None, all system checks are performed. tags can be a list of check tags, like compatibility or models.
Deprecated since version 1.7: Replaced with the check command
If app is None, then all installed apps are checked for errors.
A management command which takes one or more installed application labels as arguments, and does something with each of them.
Rather than implementing handle(), subclasses must implement handle_app_config(), which will be called once for each application.
Perform the command’s actions for app_config, which will be an AppConfig instance corresponding to an application label given on the command line.
Previously, AppCommand subclasses had to implement handle_app(app, **options) where app was a models module. The new API makes it possible to handle applications without a models module. The fastest way to migrate is as follows:
def handle_app_config(app_config, **options):
if app_config.models_module is None:
return # Or raise an exception.
app = app_config.models_module
# Copy the implementation of handle_app(app_config, **options) here.
However, you may be able to simplify the implementation by using directly the attributes of app_config.
A management command which takes one or more arbitrary arguments (labels) on the command line, and does something with each of them.
Rather than implementing handle(), subclasses must implement handle_label(), which will be called once for each label.
Perform the command’s actions for label, which will be the string as given on the command line.
A command which takes no arguments on the command line.
Rather than implementing handle(), subclasses must implement handle_noargs(); handle() itself is overridden to ensure no arguments are passed to the command.
Perform this command’s actions
Exception class indicating a problem while executing a management command.
If this exception is raised during the execution of a management command from a command line console, it will be caught and turned into a nicely-printed error message to the appropriate output stream (i.e., stderr); as a result, raising this exception (with a sensible description of the error) is the preferred way to indicate that something has gone wrong in the execution of a command.
If a management command is called from code through call_command, it’s up to you to catch the exception when needed.
Jul 20, 2015