Is it possible to dockerize Django flatpages? - django

Question

I need to handle Django pages that don't have their own app, and the Django documentation recommends I use flatpages for one-off pages. However, these pages are stored in the database attached to Django, not the filesystem.
This is causing issues because I can't transfer data in the database the same way I can transfer files in the filesystem.
When I run the website through docker-compose, it starts with a fresh postgres image with no data. As a result, the flatpages are left behind anytime I re-run the docker container without migrating all of the data.
The only solution I can think of is simply copying over the flatpages manually every time I bring the website to a new machine. Unfortunately, this seems like a terrible solution because it adds more deployment steps and goes against the ideology of dockerizing websites.
Is there a better solution available?

Answer 1

The (semi-tested) solution I've found is to use a Django data migration, and run the command python manage.py migrate --noinput before starting the server via my docker-compose file.
The data migration itself makes use of the "RunPython" operation, which allows the creation of a hard-coded flatpages through python.
The rough draft of my migration looks like this:
from django.conf import settings
from django.db import migrations, models
from django.contrib.flatpages.models import FlatPage
from django.contrib.sites.models import Site
FLATPAGES = [
{
"title": "Home",
"url": "/home/",
"content": "",
"enable_comments": False,
"template_name":"home.html",
"registration_required": False
},
]
def add_flatpages_data(apps, schema_editor):
site = Site.objects.create(domain='domain.here', name='name.here')
for page_dict in FLATPAGES:
new_page = FlatPage.objects.create(
title=page_dict['title'],
url=page_dict['url'],
content=page_dict['content'],
enable_comments=page_dict['enable_comments'],
template_name=page_dict['template_name'],
registration_required=page_dict['registration_required'],
)
new_page.sites.add(site)
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
dependencies = [
]
operations = [
migrations.RunPython(
add_flatpages_data,
),
]
This isn't pretty, and I don't think it's good whatsoever, but it's the only solution I have found thus far.
As it turns out, Django's fixtures will not work for this application, as Fixtures can only be used for models defined in an app created by the developer. The only reason this is the case is that Django tries to read the fixture's model as "app.model", and thus will not accept the model "django.contrib.flatpages.FlatPage", despite it being just as valid.
I would still like improvements and alternate solutions from others, but I thought I should document my findings.