Django-faker

Django-faker uses PyFaker to generate test data for Django models and templates.

How to use

To install Django-faker you can use pip:

pip install django-faker

Configuration

In django application settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = (

    # ...
    'django_faker',
)

FAKER_LOCALE = None     # settings.LANGUAGE_CODE is loaded
FAKER_PROVIDERS = None  # faker.DEFAULT_PROVIDERS is loaded (all)

Populating Django Models

Django-faker provides an adapter for Django Models, for easy population of test databases. To populate with Model instances, create a new Populator class, then list the class and number of all of Models that must be generated. To launch the actual data population, call execute() method.

Here is an example showing how to populate 5 Game and 10 Player objects:

from django_faker import Faker
# this Populator is only a function thats return a django_faker.populator.Populator instance
# correctly initialized with a faker.generator.Generator instance, configured as above
populator = Faker.getPopulator()

from myapp.models import Game, Player
populator.addEntity(Game,5)
populator.addEntity(Player,10)

insertedPks = populator.execute()

The populator uses name and column type guessers to populate each column with relevant data. For instance, Django-faker populates a column named first_name using the firstName formatter, and a column with a datetime instance using the dateTime. The resulting entities are therefore coherent. If Django-faker misinterprets a column name, you can still specify a custom function to be used for populating a particular column, using the third argument to addEntity():

populator.addEntity(Player, 10, {
    'score':    lambda x: populator.generator.randomInt(0,1000),
    'nickname': lambda x: populator.generator.email(),
})
populator.execute()

Of course, Django-faker does not populate autoincremented primary keys. In addition, django_faker.populator.Populator.execute() returns the list of inserted PKs, indexed by class:

print insertedPks
{
    <class 'faker.django.tests.Player'>: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10],
    <class 'faker.django.tests.Game'>: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
}

In the previous example, the Player and Game models share a relationship. Since Game entities are populated first, Faker is smart enough to relate the populated Player entities to one of populated Game entities.

Template tags and filter

Django-faker offers a useful template tags and filters for interact with PyFaker:

{% fake 'name' as myname %}{% fake 'dateTimeBetween' '-10d' as mydate %}

{{ myname|title }} - {{ mydate|date:"M Y" }}



{% load fakers %}

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<contacts>
    {% fake 'randomInt' 10 20 as times %}
    {% for i in 10|get_range %}
    <contact firstName="{% fakestr 'firstName' %}" lastName="{% fakestr 'lastName' %}" email="{% fakestr 'email' %}"/>
        <phone number="{% fakestr 'phoneNumber' %}"/>
        {% if 'boolean'|fake:25 %}
        <birth date="{{ 'dateTimeThisCentury'|fake|date:"D d M Y" }}" place="{% fakestr 'city' %}"/>
        {% endif %}
        <address>
            <street>{% fakestr 'streetAddress' %}</street>
            <city>{% fakestr 'city' %}</city>
            <postcode>{% fakestr 'postcode' %}</postcode>
            <state>{% fakestr 'state' %}</state>
        </address>
        <company name="{% fakestr 'company' %}" catchPhrase="{% fakestr 'catchPhrase' %}">
        {% if 'boolean'|fake:25 %}
            <offer>{% fakestr 'bs' %}</offer>
        {% endif %}
        {% if 'boolean'|fake:33 %}
            <director name="{% fakestr 'name' %}" />
        {% endif %}
        </company>
        {% if 'boolean'|fake:15 %}
        <details>
        <![CDATA[
        {% fakestr 'text' 500 %}
        ]]>
        </details>
        {% endif %}
    </contact>
    {% endfor %}
</contacts>

Page preview

Open url.py in your main application and add this url:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    ...
    url(r'', include('django_faker.urls')),
    ...
)

http://127.0.0.1:8000/preview/ shows a faked browser windows, useful for screenshots.

Running the Tests

Run django tests in a django environment:

$ python runtests.py

or if you have 'django_faker' in INSTALLED_APPS:

$ python manage.py test django_faker