django-fixture-media is a Django app that lets you have media files in your model fixtures. It upgrades Django's loaddata command to copy media files in your fixture paths to your project's MEDIA_ROOT directory. Its dumpdata command also copies out references media files alongside the dumped fixture.

Install django-fixture-media as any other Python package to your Django project's Python environment. Then add fixturemedia to your INSTALLED_APPS setting:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    #'django.contrib.admin',
    # ...
    'fixturemedia',
    #'yourapp',
)

The management commands are named loaddata and dumpdata, overriding Django's built-in commands of the same names.

When you use dumpdata to dump a fixture with media files, you necessarily need to write the fixture to disk, so that media files can be written with it. The dumpdata command has a required --outfile argument for specifying where on disk to write the file to.

$ ./manage.py dumpdata --outfile myapp/fixtures/archive.json

Any media files referenced by FileField fields (including subclasses like ImageField) in the dumped models will be written to a neighboring media/ directory.

$ ls -R myapp/fixtures/media | head -7
artwork

myapp/fixtures/media/artwork:
1067342064.jpeg
1266612525.jpg
1284255080.jpg
1420544354.jpg

To load a fixture, use loaddata as you normally would.

$ ./manage.py loaddata myapp/fixtures/archive.json

Media files referenced by file fields in the loaded models are sought in media/ subdirectories inside the project's fixture paths. Found media files are copied from there to your project's MEDIA_ROOT.

$ ls -R mysite/media | head -7
artwork

mysite/media/artwork:
1067342064.jpeg
1266612525.jpg
1284255080.jpg
1420544354.jpg