Problems with contenttypes when loading a fixture in Django

manage.py dumpdata --natural will use a more durable representation of foreign keys. In django they are called "natural keys". For example:

• Permission.codename is used in favour of Permission.id
• User.username is used in favour of User.id

Read more: natural keys section in "serializing django objects"

Some other useful arguments for dumpdata:

• --indent=4 make it human readable.
• -e sessions exclude session data
• -e admin exclude history of admin actions on admin site
• -e contenttypes -e auth.Permission exclude objects which are recreated automatically from schema every time during syncdb. Only use it together with --natural or else you might end up with badly aligned id numbers.

The answers here all old... As of 2017, the best answer is:

manage.py dumpdata --natural-foreign --natural-primary -e contenttypes -e auth.Permission --indent 4

Yes, this is really irritating. For a while I worked around it by doing a "manage.py reset" on the contenttypes app prior to loading the fixture (to get rid of the automatically-generated contenttypes data that differed from the dumped version). That worked, but eventually I got sick of the hassles and abandoned fixtures entirely in favor of straight SQL dumps (of course, then you lose DB portability).

update - the best answer is to use the --natural flag to dumpdata, as noted in an answer below. That flag did not exist yet when I wrote this answer.

Try skipping contenttypes when creating fixture:

./manage.py dumpdata --exclude contenttypes > fixture.json

It worked for me in a similar situation for unit tests, your insight regarding the contenttypes really helped!

I was not using MySQL but instead importing some data from a live server into sqlite. Clearing the contenttypes app data before performing loaddata did the trick:

from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType
ContentType.objects.all().delete()
quit()

And then

python manage.py loaddata data.json

I have resolved this issue in my test cases by resetting the contenttypes app from the unit test prior to loading my dump file. Carl suggested this already using the manage.py command and I do the same thing only using the call_command method:

>>> from django.core import management
>>> management.call_command("flush", verbosity=0, interactive=False)
>>> management.call_command("reset", "contenttypes", verbosity=0, interactive=False)
>>> management.call_command("loaddata", "full_test_data.json", verbosity=0)

My full_test_data.json fixture contains the contenttypes app dump that corresponds to the rest of the test data. By resetting the app before loading, it prevents the duplicate key IntegrityError.

You need to use natural keys to represent any foreign key and many-to-many relationships. Moreover, it might be a good idea to exclude the session table in the sessions app, and the logentry table in the admin app.

Django 1.7+

python manage.py dumpdata --natural-foreign --exclude contenttypes --exclude auth.permission --exclude admin.logentry --exclude sessions.session --indent 4 > fixture.json

Django <1.7

python manage.py dumpdata --natural --exclude contenttypes --exclude auth.permission --exclude admin.logentry --exclude sessions.session --indent 4 > fixture.json

According to the Django documentation, --natural has been deprecated in version 1.7, so the option --natural-foreign should be used instead.

You can also omit the primary key in the serialized data of this object since it can be calculated during deserialization by passing the --natural-primary flag.

python manage.py dumpdata --natural-foreign --natural-primary --exclude contenttypes --exclude auth.permission --exclude admin.logentry --exclude sessions.session --indent 4 > fixture.json

python manage.py dumpdata --natural-primary --exclude=contenttypes --exclude=auth.Permission --exclude=admin.logentry --exclude=sessions.session --indent 4 > initial_data.json

This works for me. Here I am excluding everything bubt the actual models.

• If you see any other model other than the models that you created you can safely exclude those. One drawback of this approach is you loose on log data as well as auth data.

./manage.py dumpdata app.Model --natural-foreign

will change

  "content_type": 123

to

  "content_type": [
    "app_label",
    "model"
  ],

And fixture works for TestCase now

Django 2.2.5

python manage.py dumpdata --exclude=contenttypes > datadump.json

it helped me

It's really, really annoying .. I get bitten by this every single time.

I tried to dumpdata with --exclude contenttypes and --natural, I always get problems..

What works best for me is simply doing a truncate table django_content_type; after the syncdb and THEN load the data.

Of course for initial_data.json autoloading you're fallball.

I tried every method from above, Nothing worked for me. I have to exclude the complete auth model and works fine.

python manage.py dumpdata --natural-primary --exclude=contenttypes --exclude=auth --exclude=admin.logentry --exclude=sessions.session --indent 4 > live.json

I'm going to give another possible answer that I just figured out. Maybe it'll help the OP, maybe it'll help somebody else.

I've got a many-to-many relationship table. It has a primary key and the two foreign keys to the other tables. I found that if I have an entry in the fixture whose two foreign keys are the same as another entry already in the table with a different pk, it will fail. M2M relationship tables have a "unique together" for the two foreign keys.

So, if it's a M2M relationship that is breaking, look at the foreign keys it's adding, look at your database to see if that pair of FKs are already listed under a different PK.

I had encountered similar error sometimes ago. It turned out that I was trying to load the fixtures before creating the necessary tables. So I did:

$ python manage.py makemigrations
$ python manage.py migrate
$ python manage.py loaddata fixtures/initial_data.json

And it worked like a charm

In my case I had dumped the data from auth (./manage.py dumpddata auth > fixtures/auth.json) to use the fixture for testing purposes.

The development continued and I removed most of the models I had defined in models.py and this is when I started to see this annoying problem.

My solution was regenerating the auth.json fixture again. This one had removed lots of entries in auth.permission related to the old models I had.

I've fixed this by adding in my tests setUp and tearDown

from django.core import management

=====

def setUp(self):
    management.call_command("loaddata", "all-data.yaml", verbosity=0)
    super(login_page_test, self).setUp()

def tearDown(self):
    management.call_command("flush", verbosity=0, interactive=False)
    super(login_page_test, self).setUp()

I used pgloader, just take a few seconds to migrate successfully:

$ pgloader project.load

project.load file with:

load database
     from sqlite:////path/to/dev.db
     into postgresql://user:pwd@localhost/db_name

 with include drop, create tables, create indexes, reset sequences

   set work_mem to '16MB', maintenance_work_mem to '512 MB';

You can try to exclude some types of data in the database when dumping data.

First, dump data:

python manage.py dumpdata --indent 4 > datadump.json

A few lines from this file for example:

[

{ "model": "admin.logentry", "pk": 1, "fields": { "action_time": "2023-09-28T08:33:24.827Z", "user": 1, "content_type": 3, "object_id": "1", "object_repr": "user", "action_flag": 1, "change_message": "[{"added": {}}]" } },

...

{ "model": "auth.permission", "pk": 1, "fields": { "name": "Can add log entry", "content_type": 1, "codename": "add_logentry" } },

...

{ "model": "auth.group", "pk": 1, "fields": { "name": "user", "permissions": [ 25, 26, 27 ] } },

...

]

Try to search and see the text like this "model" in the json dump file.

You can also find all types of content in the contenttype model, a table for the this model is django_content_type:

SELECT * FROM django_content_type ORDER BY id;

An example of data from this table:

+----+--------------+----------------+
| id | app_label    | model          |
+----+--------------+----------------+
|  1 | admin        | logentry       |
|  2 | auth         | permission     |
|  3 | auth         | group          |
|  4 | contenttypes | contenttype    |
|  5 | sessions     | session        |
|  6 | user         | user           |
|  7 | user         | historicaluser |
|  8 | constance    | constance      |
|  9 | tracking     | pageview       |
| 10 | tracking     | visitor        |
+----+--------------+----------------+

After you can exclude this type of data by adding several --exclude to the manage.py dumpdata

For example:

• "model": "auth.permission", can be excluded like this: --exclude auth.permission. Using this option --exclude auth you can exclude all models for application auth, if there are such models, in this case these will be the permission and the group models.
• "model": "contenttypes.contenttype", can be excluded like this: --exclude contenttypes.contenttype.
• "model": "user.historicaluser", can be excluded like this: --exclude user.historicaluser.
• "model": "sessions.session", can be excluded like this: --exclude sessions.session or --exclude sessions.
• "model": "tracking.pageview", can be excluded like this: --exclude tracking.pageview. If you use --exclude tracking, both models tracking.pageview and tracking.visitor will be excluded.

The final code for 5 lines above:

python manage.py dumpdata --exclude auth.permission --exclude contenttypes --exclude user.historicaluser --exclude sessions.session --exclude tracking --indent 4 > dumpdata.json

You can also combine the dump script with --natural-foreign and --natural-primary options, read more here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.0/topics/serialization/#natural-keys.