Django test script to pre-populate DB - django

Question

I'm trying to pre-populate the database with some test data for my Django project. Is there some easy way to do this with a script that's "outside" of Django?
Let's say I want to do this very simple task, creating 5 test users using the following code,
N = 10
i = 0
while i < N:
c = 'user' + str(i) + '#gmail.com'
u = lancer.models.CustomUser.objects.create_user(email=c, password="12345")
i = i + 1
The questions are,
WHERE do I put this test script file?
WHAT IMPORTS / COMMANDS do I need to put at the beginning of the file so it has access to all the Django environment & resources as if I were writing this inside the app?
I'm thinking you'd have to import and set up the settings file, and import the app's models, etc... but all my attempts have failed one way or another, so would appreciate some help =)
Thanks!
Providing another answer
The respondes below are excellent answers. I fiddled around and found an alternative way. I added the following to the top of the test data script,
from django.core.management import setup_environ
from project_lancer import settings
setup_environ(settings)
import lancer.models
Now my code above works.

Answer 1

I recommend you to use fixtures for these purposes:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/initial-data/
If you still want to use this initial code then read:
If you use south you can create migration and put this code there:
python manage.py schemamigration --empty my_data_migration
class Migration(SchemaMigration):
no_dry_run = False
def forwards(self, orm):
# more pythonic, you can also use bulk_insert here
for i in xrange(10):
email = "user{}#gmail.com".format(i)
u = orm.CustomUser.objects.create_user(email=email, password='12345)
You can put it to setUp method of your TestCase:
class MyTestCase(TestCase):
def setUp(self):
# more pythonic, you can also use bulk_insert here
for i in xrange(10):
email = "user{}#gmail.com".format(i)
u = lancer.models.CustomUser.objects.create_user(email=email,
password='12345')
def test_foo(self):
pass
Also you can define your BaseTestCase in which you override setUp method then you create your TestCase classes that inherit from BaseTestCase:
class BaseTestCase(TestCase):
def setUp(self):
'your initial logic here'
class MyFirstTestCase(BaseTestCase):
pase
class MySecondTestCase(BaseTestCase):
pase
But I think that fixtures is the best way:
class BaseTestCase(TestCase):
fixtures = ['users_for_test.json']
class MyFirstTestCase(BaseTestCase):
pase
class MySecondTestCase(BaseTestCase):
fixtures = ['special_users_for_only_this_test_case.json']
Updated:
python manage.py shell
from django.contrib.auth.hashers import make_password
make_password('12312312')
'pbkdf2_sha256$10000$9KQ15rVsxZ0t$xMEKUicxtRjfxHobZ7I9Lh56B6Pkw7K8cO0ow2qCKdc='

Answer 2

You can also use something like this or this to auto-populate your models for testing purposes.