Best Practices for Avoiding Circular Imports and Maintaining App Independence in Django

Using Django
1

To avoid circular import errors and maintain app independence in a Django project, i found two ways to avoid model cross importation across apps

  1. Using Django signals to handle cross-app interactions.
  2. Using apps.get_model to dynamically fetch models.

Which approach is better in terms of maintainability and adherence to Django best practices? Are there specific scenarios where one should be preferred over the other?

2

It would probably be useful to share some examples of where you were experiencing this problem. Maybe there are other solutions for those specific situations.

3

I have two apps: instance and volume. Updates in the instance model require corresponding updates in the volume model. i can import the volume to instance directly or i can do this using apps.get_model and using signal also i can do this. but what is the correct way to do this, is there is any Django way ?

4

If the models are that closely linked, my first question would be to ask why they are in separate apps.

<opinion>
Using get_model feels like a “work-around”, and signals, in the general case should be avoided. (There are many threads here discussing that issue.)

I am also of the mindset of “One app until proven otherwise.”
</opinion>