How to Create Custom Django Management Commands

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Django comes with a variety of command line utilities that can be either invoked using django-admin.py or the convenient manage.py script.

We can also add our own commands. Those management commands can be very handy when you need to interact with your application via command line using a terminal and it can also serve as an interface to execute cron jobs.

Introduction:

You are probably already familiar with commands like

python manage.py startapp

python manage.py startproject
python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py runserver
python manage.py collectstatic

To see a complete list of commands you can run the command below:

python manage.py help

We can create our own commands for our apps and include them in the list by creating a management/commands directory inside an app directory, like below:

mysite/ 

    |-- core/ 

    |      |-- management/ 

    |      |       +--   commands/ 

    |      |                +--my_custom_command.py 

    |      |-- migrations/ 

    |      |       +-- __init__.py 

    |      | -- __init__.py 

    |      | -- admin.py 

    |      | -- apps.py 

    |      | -- models.py 

    |      | -- tests.py 

    |        +-- views.py 

    | -- mysite/ 

    |        | -- __init__.py 

    |        | -- settings.py 

    |        | --urls.py 

    |        | --wsgi.py 

    +-- manage.py

mysite/

|-- core/

| |-- management/

| | +-- commands/

| | +--my_custom_command.py

| |-- migrations/

| | +-- __init__.py

| | -- __init__.py

| | -- admin.py

| | -- apps.py

| | -- models.py

| | -- tests.py

| +-- views.py

| -- mysite/

| | -- __init__.py

| | -- settings.py

| | --urls.py

| | --wsgi.py

+-- manage.py

The name of the command file will be used to invoke using the command line utility.

For example, if our command was called my_custom_command.py , then we will be able to execute it via:

python manage.py my_custom_command

Basic Example

A basic example of what the custom command should look like:

management/commands/current_time.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)