Alpaca is a an app that allows you to easily write South migrations to load fixtures. The main difference between Alpaca's way of loading fixtures and django's way of loading fixtures is that Alpaca gives you control on whether or not the data is overridden when the fixtures are rerun. In addition, since the fixtures are loaded within migrations, you can write them once and your migrations will modify them to their correct state.

Alpaca gives you the option to override the data completely like how django does it now or queries the database for an existing object and skips over it if it already exists. In addition, Alpaca also gives you control on the behavior when the migration is run backwards. The default behavior is to delete the object.

Here is an example fixture migration:

import datetime
import os
from south.db import db
from alpaca.migration import FixtureMigration


class Migration(FixtureMigration):
    fixtures = ['categories.json']
    defer = True
    remove_on_backwards = True

Done.

• Testing