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Create custom management commands in Django framework

Django comes with a variety of command line utilities that can be invoked using manage.py script. In addition to all existing commands (like this command to create a new app:python manage.py startapp custom) you can also add your own commands. These custom management commands can be very useful when you need to interact with your application via command line using a terminal and it can also serve as an interface to execute recurring jobs.

Each application in django can have their own commands. you can add new commands by creating a management/commands directory inside an app directory. Django will register a manage.py command for each Python module in that directory whose name doesn’t begin with an underscore:

custom_app/
    __init__.py
    models.py
    management/
        commands/
            _private.py
            show_date.py
    tests.py
    views.py

Basic Example

In this example _private.py won’t be registered in django manage.py commands but show_date.py command will be registered and you can run it using:

python manage.py show_date

Now let’s demonstrate a basic example of what the our custom command should look like:

management/commands/show_date.py

from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand
from django.utils import timezone
class Command(BaseCommand):
     help = 'Displays current time'
     def handle(self, *args, **kwargs):
         time = timezone.now().strftime('%X') 
         self.stdout.write("It's now %s" % time)

A Django management command is a child of BaseCommand composed by a class named Command. The command code should be defined inside the handle() method.

Positional Arguments

You can add optional arguments to the custom command using add_arguments()

from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand
from django.utils import timezone
class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = 'Displays current time'
    def add_arguments(self, parser):
        # Positional arguments
        parser.add_argument('test', nargs='+', type=int)
    def handle(self, *args, **kwargs):
         for arg in kwargs['test']:
             print(arg)
         time = timezone.now().strftime('%X') 
         self.stdout.write("It's now %s" % time)

Optional Arguments

To add custom options to command you can add named argument to the command

from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand
from django.utils import timezone
class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = 'Displays current time'
    def add_arguments(self, parser):
        # Positional arguments
        parser.add_argument('test', nargs='+', type=int)
        # Named (optional) arguments
        parser.add_argument(
        '--delete',
        action='store_true',
        help='Delete something',
        )
    def handle(self, *args, **kwargs):
         for arg in kwargs['test']:
             print(arg)
         time = timezone.now().strftime('%X') 
         self.stdout.write("It's now %s" % time)

You can run show_date custom command with arguments like this:

python manage.py show_date test_me --delete=True

Source:

• Django docs