Integrating with a legacy database
These docs are frozen for Django version 0.91. For current documentation, go here.
While Django is best suited for developing new applications, it's quite possible to integrate it into legacy databases. Django includes a couple of utilities to automate as much of this process as possible.
This document assumes you know the Django basics, as covered in the official tutorial.
Give Django your database parameters
You'll need to tell Django what your database connection parameters are, and what the name of the database is. Do that by editing these settings in your settings file:
Auto-generate the models
Django comes with a utility that can create models by introspecting an existing database. You can view the output by running this command:
django-admin.py inspectdb [databasename] --settings=path.to.settings
...where "[databasename]" is the name of your database.
Save this as a file by using standard Unix output redirection:
django-admin.py inspectdb [databasename] --settings=path.to.settings > appname.py
This feature is meant as a shortcut, not as definitive model generation. See the django-admin.py documentation for more information.
Once you've cleaned up the model, put the module in the models directory of your app, and add it to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.
Install the core Django tables
Next, run the django-admin.py init command to install Django's core tables in your database:
django-admin.py init --settings=path.to.settings
This won't work if your database already contains tables that have any of the following names:
- sites
- packages
- content_types
- core_sessions
- auth_permissions
- auth_groups
- auth_users
- auth_messages
- auth_groups_permissions
- auth_users_groups
- auth_users_user_permissions
If that's the case, try renaming one of your tables to resolve naming conflicts. Currently, there's no way of customizing the names of Django's database tables without editing Django's source code itself.
Install metadata about your app
Django has a couple of database tables that contain metadata about your apps. You'll need to execute the SQL output by this command:
django-admin.py sqlinitialdata [appname] --settings=path.to.settings
See whether it worked
That's it. Try accessing your data via the Django database API, and try editing objects via Django's admin site.
