Check your Django Migrations on every commit

Keeping your models in sync with your migrations is an important part of any Django app. My team and I frequently make changes to our models and we occassionally forget to create new migrations for those changes. This results in errors and data loss. Let’s look at an easy way to ensure your models and migrations are always in sync: We’ll use a simple Product model. class Product(models.Model): name = models.CharField(max_length=255) Let’s say we want to add a quantity field. ...

May 8, 2021 · 2 min · Johnny Metz

Find all N+1 violations in your Django app

The N+1 problem is a common database performance issue. It plagues ORM’s, such as Django and SQLAlchemy, because it leads to your application making more database queries than necessary. Let’s look at a basic example in Django. class Artist(models.Model): name = models.CharField(max_length=255) class Song(models.Model): artist = models.ForeignKey(Artist, on_delete=models.CASCADE) name = models.CharField(max_length=255) def print_songs(): for song in Song.objects.all(): print(f"{song.artist.name} - {song.name}") Now let’s create a unit test to ensure print_songs runs successfully. We’re using pytest and pytest-django so we can create the test data using a pytest fixture. When we run the unit test, you’ll notice it passes and our songs are printed to the terminal. Everything seems fine on the surface. ...

April 13, 2021 · 3 min · Johnny Metz