How to transfer data from one database to another in Django? - django

Question

I am recreating a web app in Django that was running in a server but it was terminated, fortunately, I did a backup of all the code. My problem comes with the database because but I do not know how to transfer all the data from the old db.sqlite3 Django database web app into the new one.
I found a similar question as mine Django: transfer data from one database to another but the user wanted to transfer data from specific columns because their models.pyfrom the old and new databases were slightly different. In my case, my models.py from the old and new databases are the same.
Alternatives
I am using the DB Browser for SQLite to explore the content of the old database and I could add manually each row into the Django administration but this will take me too much time.
I could copy the old db.sqlite and replace it in the new web app because the models.py file remains the same but this solution is not appropriate IMO, this solution is rude and I think it goes against the good practices of Software.
How should I proceed for transferring data from the old database to the new one?

Answer 1

This seems like a one time copy of one db to another. I don't see how this goes against good software practice unless you have to be copying this db frequently. I've done it before when migrating servers and it doesn't cause any issues assuming the two instances of the application are the same build.

Answer 2

I was able to do some minor tricks in order to solve my problem because there is not a straightforward functionality that allows you to transfer all your data from two sqlite databases in Django. Here is the trick I did:
Download the sqlite db browser to explore and export the contents of your old database in a .csv file. Open you database with sqlite db browser and hit on the tables option and you will see all your tables, then do a right click on any of those and hit the export as a csv file option to generate the csv file (name_of_your_csv_file.csv). The other alternative is to use the sqlite3.exe to open your database in cmd or powershell and then doing the export with:
.tables #this lets you explore your available tables
headers on
mode csv
output name_of_your_csv_file.csv
2.There are two choices up to this point: You can either insert all the records at once to your new database or you can drop your existing tables from the new database and then recreate them and import the .csv file. I went for the drop option because there were more than 100 records to migrate.
# sqlite3
# check the structure of your table so you can re-create it
.schema <table_name>
#the result might be something like CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS "web_app_navigator_table" ("id" integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT, "ticket" varchar(120) NOT NULL);
#drop the table
drop table web_app_navigator_table
#re-create the table
create table web_app_navigator_table(id integer not null primary key autoincrement, ticket varchar(120) not null);
#do the import of the csv file
.import C:/Users/a/PycharmProjects/apps/navigator/name_of_your_csv_file.csv table_name_goes_here
You might see an error such as csv:1: INSERT failed datatype mismatch but this indicates that the first row of your csv file was not inserted because it contains the headers of the exported data from your old database.