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v0.4 vs v1.0

Version 1.0.0 is a ground-up rewrite. The concept — zero-config, whole-project seeding by introspection — is unchanged; almost everything beneath it is new. This page is the short story of why, and what changed.

Why a rewrite

django-data-seed 0.4.2 worked for the happy path but had correctness problems in almost every other code path:

  • URLField and SlugField generated plain text (dispatch matched them as CharField),
  • unique numeric fields and the generic unique-retry helper crashed on collision,
  • foreign-key cycles recursed until the stack blew,
  • every seeded object was saved twice,
  • DecimalField ignored max_digits,
  • the backup/log-entry features registered unfiltered global signal receivers that ran on every save() in the host project — and their migrations were gitignored, so those tables never even existed when installed from PyPI,
  • ~25 test models shipped inside the package, creating junk tables in every installer's database.

These weren't tweaks to make — they were a design to replace.

What changed at a glance

Area 0.4.x 1.0.0
Generator Faker Mimesis (why)
Field dispatch list-order isinstance (buggy) most-specific class by MRO
Realistic values none field-name inference + locales
Foreign keys fresh parent tree per child (row explosion); cycles crash dependency graph, reuse-by-default, cycles handled
Row coherence none ordered dates, one persona/address per row
Uniqueness N+1 SELECT per value in-memory, single and multi-column
Schema safety fails mid-insert pre-flight checks before any write
Performance per-row create() (twice!) bulk_create, batched
CLI colorama prints rich checklist, progress, summary
Python API none seed(), SeedPlan, SeedResult
Reproducibility none --seed
Dependencies Faker, colorama, … Django, mimesis, rich
Test models shipped into your DB live in the package's own test suite
Audit/backup/middleware bundled, global receivers removed (use a dedicated audit package)

Breaking changes

1.0 is intentionally breaking. The headline items:

  • The backup / log-entry / current-user features and their global signal receivers are gone. Use django-simple-history or django-auditlog for an audit trail.
  • The bundled test models no longer ship.
  • --no-of-objects-to-create → --count (old flag warns, removed in 1.1).
  • Python ≥ 3.10 and Django ≥ 4.0 required.

The full list and upgrade steps are in Migrating, and every change is itemised in the Changelog.