How do I get the object if it exists, or None if it does not exist in Django?

Question

There is no 'built in' way to do this. Django will raise the DoesNotExist exception every time. The idiomatic way to handle this in python is to wrap it in a try catch:

try:
    go = SomeModel.objects.get(foo='bar')
except SomeModel.DoesNotExist:
    go = None

What I did do, is to subclass models.Manager, create a safe_get like the code above and use that manager for my models. That way you can write: SomeModel.objects.safe_get(foo='bar').

Since django 1.6 you can use first() method like so:

Content.objects.filter(name="baby").first()

From django docs

get() raises a DoesNotExist exception if an object is not found for the given parameters. This exception is also an attribute of the model class. The DoesNotExist exception inherits from django.core.exceptions.ObjectDoesNotExist

You can catch the exception and assign None to go.

from django.core.exceptions import ObjectDoesNotExist
try:
    go  = Content.objects.get(name="baby")
except ObjectDoesNotExist:
    go = None

You can create a generic function for this.

def get_or_none(classmodel, **kwargs):
    try:
        return classmodel.objects.get(**kwargs)
    except classmodel.DoesNotExist:
        return None

Use this like below:

go = get_or_none(Content,name="baby")

go will be None if no entry matches else will return the Content entry.

Note:It will raises exception MultipleObjectsReturned if more than one entry returned for name="baby".

You should handle it on the data model to avoid this kind of error but you may prefer to log it at run time like this:

def get_or_none(classmodel, **kwargs):
    try:
        return classmodel.objects.get(**kwargs)
    except classmodel.MultipleObjectsReturned as e:
        print('ERR====>', e)

    except classmodel.DoesNotExist:
        return None

You can do it this way:

go  = Content.objects.filter(name="baby").first()

Now go variable could be either the object you want or None

Ref: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/ref/models/querysets/#django.db.models.query.QuerySet.first

To make things easier, here is a snippet of the code I wrote, based on inputs from the wonderful replies here:

class MyManager(models.Manager):

    def get_or_none(self, **kwargs):
        try:
            return self.get(**kwargs)
        except ObjectDoesNotExist:
            return None

And then in your model:

class MyModel(models.Model):
    objects = MyManager()

That's it. Now you have MyModel.objects.get() as well as MyModel.objetcs.get_or_none()

you could use exists with a filter:

Content.objects.filter(name="baby").exists()
#returns False or True depending on if there is anything in the QS

just an alternative for if you only want to know if it exists