I want to run a command for the duration of the lifetime of the website. I don't want to run it more than once.
Let's say I want to run the query:
set names utf8mb4;
Then I would just run something like:
SomeRandomObject.objects.raw('set names utf8mb4;')
Where should I put this? Does it matter what object I run the query on? Is there a better object?
I usually do this off the connection object itself.
from django.db import connections
cursor = connections['DATABASE_NAME'].cursor()
# replace DATABASE_NAME with the name of your
# DATABASE connection, i.e., the appropriate key in the
# settings.DATABASES dictionary
cursor.execute("set names utf8mb4;")
This way you can avoid having to use some random model to run your raw queries.
n.b. if you only have one database connection, i.e., default you can use:
from django.db import connection
cursor = connection.cursor()
cursor.execute("set names utf8mb4;")
To run this once at startup, you can add the following to your DATABASES
DATABASES = {
'default': {
...
'OPTIONS': {
"init_command": "set names utf8mb4;"
}
}
}
