How to generate fake test data using faker?

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layout: post title: 'How to generate test data for your Django projects' author: 'Yun Ji' date: 2021-06-31

categories: python

Before I looked into how to generate test data, I did it manually. That was laboring, repeatative and boring, like most manual work that can be anutomated. For my last project, after some youtubing and goolging, I used random and faker to create test data, along with Django's BaseCommand class to create commands that you can run to create data.

Let's get started!

01

In your project app file(for example, my project file is project4, my app is commerce, do this in your app file), create management/commands, within the folder, create a file named createdata.py. This is what your directory should look like:

polls/
    __init__.py
    models.py
    management/
        __init__.py
        commands/
            __init__.py
            _private.py
            crearedata.py
    tests.py
    views.py

Let's import all the useful stuff:

from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand
from faker import Faker
import faker.providers
from auctions.models import User, Listing, Bid, Comment, Watchlist
import random

And install faker pip install Faker

We could use faker's provider library, on top of that, we could also create customed providers.

Let's test faker first.

This is the syntax to create Django Commands:

class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = "Command information"

    def handle(self, *args, **kwargs):

        fake = Faker()
        print(fake.name())

In your terminal, run the Django command python manage.py createdata It should print out a random name. Mine is Laura Kim

Please refer to Faker's documentation