Hello everyone! I have difficulties setting up my Django project to account for shared DB tables. More specifically, I have models that refer with a Foreign Key a table not managed by my app (different app in a different docker container). Following Django philosophy, the solution would be to mar…

Welcome @Pavinati ! There have been a couple threads here talking about this. Hopefully you might get some useful ideas from them. Testing unmanaged models - creating DB tables with SchemaEditor Testing unmanaged models - a cleaner approach https://groups.google.com/g/django-developers/c/_…

Thanks @KenWhitesell ! Indeed I had a look at those, and i partially mentioned them in the new-feature post. In the end it all comes down to dev experience using the Django framework. For my specific use case, i decided to keep the models managed, but faking migrations in production (py manage.py…

I frequently reference unmanaged tables. In these cases, these tables tend to be owned by other systems and the schemas are rarely changed. For the most part, I don’t need to worry about any migration applying to them. When looking to test such a system, I create a “template” db with the unmanaged …

I create a “template” db with the unmanaged tables and the appropriate test data Does Django have a way to define what’s the “database template” to be used during tests? For this template to work, it will have to be setup before migrations, otherwise migrations will fail when trying to create Fo…

[image] Pavinati: Does Django have a way to define what’s the “database template” to be used during tests? I’d guess there’s probably a hook somewhere that you could tie in to, but I haven’t bothered looking for one. But again, my perspective on this is different. For a couple of reasons, wi…

Unmanaged models in tests

Using Django

KenWhitesell June 8, 2026, 11:01am 2

Welcome @Pavinati !

There have been a couple threads here talking about this. Hopefully you might get some useful ideas from them.

Testing unmanaged models - creating DB tables with SchemaEditor
Testing unmanaged models - a cleaner approach
https://groups.google.com/g/django-developers/c/_Nt263pPXgM/m/ptnrnpgfAQAJ

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Unmanaged models in tests

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