Automatically create an admin user when running Django's ./manage.py syncdb

Question

My project is in early development. I frequently delete the database and run manage.py syncdb to set up my app from scratch.

Unfortunately, this always pops up:

You just installed Django's auth system, which means you don't have any superusers defined. Would you like to create one now? (yes/no):  

Then you have supply a username, valid email adress and password. This is tedious. I'm getting tired of typing test\[email protected]\ntest\ntest\n.

How can I automatically skip this step and create a user programatically when running manage.py syncdb ?

Answer 1

I know the question has been answered already but ...

A Much simpler approach is to dump the auth module data into a json file once the superuser has been created:

 ./manage.py dumpdata --indent=2 auth > initial_data.json 

You can also dump the sessions data:

./manage.py dumpdata --indent=2 sessions 

You can then append the session info to the auth module dump (and probably increase the expire_date so it does not expire... ever ;-).

From then, you can use

/manage.py syncdb --noinput 

to load the superuser and his session when creating the db with no interactive prompt asking you about a superuser.

Answer 2

Instead of deleting your entire database, just delete the tables of your app before running the syncdb

This will accomplish it for you in a single line (per app):

python manage.py sqlclear appname | python manage.py dbshell 

The first command will look at your app and generate the required SQL to drop the tables. This output is then piped to the dbshell to execute it.

After its done, run your syncdb to recreate the tables:

python manage.py syncdb