How Model Bakery behaves?

By default, Model Bakery skips fields with null=True or blank=True. Also if a field has a default value, it will be used.

You can override this behavior by:

  1. Explicitly defining values

# from "Basic Usage" page, assume all fields either null=True or blank=True
from model_bakery import baker

customer = baker.make('shop.Customer', enjoy_jards_macale=True, bio="A fan of Jards Malacé")

  1. Passing _fill_optional with a list of fields to fill with random data

customer = baker.make('shop.Customer', _fill_optional=['enjoy_jards_macale', 'bio'])

  1. Passing _fill_optional=True to fill all fields with random data

customer = baker.make('shop.Customer', _fill_optional=True)

When shouldn’t you let Baker generate things for you?

If you have fields with special validation, you should set their values by yourself.

Model Bakery should handle fields that:

  1. don’t matter for the test you’re writing;

  2. don’t require special validation (like unique, etc);

  3. are required to create the object.

Currently supported fields

  • BooleanField, NullBooleanField, IntegerField, BigIntegerField, SmallIntegerField, PositiveIntegerField, PositiveSmallIntegerField, FloatField, DecimalField

  • CharField, TextField, BinaryField, SlugField, URLField, EmailField, IPAddressField, GenericIPAddressField, ContentType

  • ForeignKey, OneToOneField, ManyToManyField (even with through model)

  • DateField, DateTimeField, TimeField, DurationField

  • FileField, ImageField

  • JSONField, ArrayField, HStoreField

  • CICharField, CIEmailField, CITextField

  • DecimalRangeField, IntegerRangeField, BigIntegerRangeField, DateRangeField, DateTimeRangeField

Require django.contrib.gis in INSTALLED_APPS:

  • GeometryField, PointField, LineStringField, PolygonField, MultiPointField, MultiLineStringField, MultiPolygonField, GeometryCollectionField

Custom fields

Model Bakery allows you to define generators methods for your custom fields or overrides its default generators. This can be achieved by specifying the field and generator function for the generators.add function. Both can be the real python objects imported in settings or just specified as import path string.

Examples:

from model_bakery import baker

def gen_func():
    return 'value'

baker.generators.add('test.generic.fields.CustomField', gen_func)

# in the module code.path:
def gen_func():
    return 'value'

# in your tests.py file:
from model_bakery import baker

baker.generators.add('test.generic.fields.CustomField', 'code.path.gen_func')

Customizing Baker

In some rare cases, you might need to customize the way Baker base class behaves. This can be achieved by creating a new class and specifying it in your settings files. It is likely that you will want to extend Baker, however the minimum requirement is that the custom class have make and prepare functions. In order for the custom class to be used, make sure to use the model_bakery.baker.make and model_bakery.baker.prepare functions, and not model_bakery.baker.Baker directly.

Examples:

# in the module code.path:
class CustomBaker(baker.Baker):
    def get_fields(self):
        return [
            field
            for field in super(CustomBaker, self).get_fields()
            if not field isinstance CustomField
        ]

# in your settings.py file:
BAKER_CUSTOM_CLASS = 'code.path.CustomBaker'

Additionally, if you want to your created instance to be returned respecting one of your custom ModelManagers, you can use the _from_manager parameter as the example below:

movie = baker.make(Movie, title='Old Boys', _from_manager='availables')  # This will use the Movie.availables model manager

Save method custom parameters

If you have overwritten the save method for a model, you can pass custom parameters to it using Model Bakery. Example:

class ProjectWithCustomSave(models.Model)
    # some model fields
    created_by = models.ForeignKey(settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL)

    def save(self, user, *args, **kwargs):
        self.created_by = user
        return super(ProjectWithCustomSave, self).save(*args, **kwargs)

#with model baker:
user = baker.make(settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL)
project = baker.make(ProjectWithCustomSave, _save_kwargs={'user': user})
assert user == project.user