Automate checks for your Django project

Extend Django's system check framework to turn painful code reviews into a joy.

We all know we should "Automate the Boring Stuff™", but how often are you manually checking PRs against your internal style guide?

Django has a powerful inbuilt check framework which you're using every day... without even realising it.

Writing your own check

Once you've done the hard work of agreeing a coding standard with your team, next comes the fun bit... implementing the check.

In this example, I want an error to be raised if:

  • a TextField or a CharField has blank=True null=True.
  • any other field has set blank=True null=False.

To learn about why these are error states, see Demystifying nulls and blanks in Django.

To do this, I wrote a function to validate a field's properties and return an error, with a message and hint, when these are my error states.

function that checks a field's blank and null values and returns an error

I create and register my check run_model_field_checks which loops through all my model fields and collects a list of errors.

For this check to be picked up it, it must be in (or imported into) a file that’s loaded when your application is loaded. For example, in the AppConfig.ready() method.

registered check run_model_field_checks

Run the check

Checks are run by some management commands such as makemigrations and migrate.

You can also run checks directly with:

$ ./manage.py check

It's also a good idea to add this to your CI and to set the fail level:

$ ./manage.py check --fail-level=WARNING

run check

Other check ideas

Here are a few more ideas:

  • Raise a warning if a Field has no verbose_name.
  • Raise an error if a verbose_name does not use gettext (if your project uses translations).
  • Raise an error if the length of a choice option is greater than your max_length.

Related Resources

Demystifying Nulls and Nlanks in Django
Demystifying Nulls and Nlanks in Django
Learn the difference between blank=True and null=True
Speed up your Django Queries
Speed up your Django Queries
Optimising queries beyond the N + 1 problem.
Django + htmx = ❤️
Django + htmx = ❤️
Speed up your Django list view with htmx and pagination.