Migrating Django projects with fixtures
When migrating a Django project it's often useful to work with the built-in dumpdata and loaddata management commands. However, this can easily lead to errors like django.db.utils.IntegrityError: Problem installing fixture Could not load foo.Bar(pk=ba): (1062, "Duplicate entry for key 'app_label'"). Such errors indictate that a similar object already exists in the database, and that you can't insert the duplicate from your fixture.
There are basically two approaches to dump data in a way that solves this problem:
- Specify exactly which models to dump
- Exclude the conflicting models from the dump
For the first approach you would use a command like:
./manage.py dumpdata --natural --indent=2 app1 app2 app3 auth.User > dump.json
I include the auth data as well in this example, because it's what I usually do. You want to include all third party apps that create their own database tables and store user generated content. You want to avoid apps that auto-populate the database, like thumbnail generators, search indexers, etc.
The second approach is to exclude models. You can do this like:
./manage.py dumpdata --natural --indent=2 --exclude=contenttypes --exclude=sessions.Session --exclude=south.Migrationhistory > dump.json
If you googled the error django.db.utils.IntegrityError: Problem installing fixture Could not load contenttypes.ContentType(pk=X): (1062, "Duplicate entry for key 'app_label'"). you probably want to exclude contenttypes. The example above also exlcudes live sessions and south migrationhistory.
Loading the fixtures
To load the fixtures you need to prepare the database on your new host. First:
./manage.py syncdb --noinput --no-initial-data
I use the --no-initial-data option by default. You might want to remove the option if some of your apps use fixtures, and you didn't include those apps in your data dump.
To finish, apply the migrations and load the data:
./manage.py migrate ./manage.py loaddata dump.json
If you still get errors, read them, and think about which data to include/exclude in the dump. Remeber to delete all objects in the database though before you try a new import. The sqlclear management command can help with that. Or you can simply DROP the database and CREATE it again.
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