I have heard good things about Django Ninja, and I was looking for an excuse to try it out.

One pain point is syncing production data to a local Django development website. Most of the time, I can dump a database and restore it locally. Sometimes, creating a REST endpoint and creating a local Django management command to consume that input is easier.

That’s what my example is doing here with Django Ninja.

schemas.py

If you have used Django REST framework’s ModelSerializer before, you will feel at home with Django Ninja’s ModelSchema.

A ModelSchema class can generate a schema from a Django model and only needs to know which Django model and which fields you want to be exposed to your endpoint.

from ninja import ModelSchema

from places.models import Place


class PlaceSchema(ModelSchema):
    class Meta:
        model = Place
        fields = [
            "name",
            "slug",
            "active",
            "place_id",
            "address",
            ...
        ]

views.py

Our Django Ninja view is going to going to query our database and return all of the active records in our Place model with respect to their creation date. Django Ninja will do the heavy lifting for us and apply our PlaceSchema which will return JSON data.

from ninja import Router
from ninja.pagination import LimitOffsetPagination
from ninja.pagination import paginate

from places.models import Place
from places.schemas import PlaceSchema


router = Router()


@router.get("/places/", response={200: list[PlaceSchema]})
@paginate(LimitOffsetPagination)
def list_places(request):
    qs = Place.objects.active().order_by("-created")
    return qs

routers.py

This routers.py file is optional, but I prefer to keep my routers separate from my urls.py, and this felt cleaner. I would keep this code for a small app in my urls.py instead.

from ninja import NinjaAPI

from places.views import router as places_router

# API setup
api = NinjaAPI(csrf=True, version="1.0.0")
api.add_router("", places_router)

urls.py

Our urls.py file is where we expose our router to the Internet so that our /apis/places/ URI will be accessible to anyone who knows it’s there.

...
from places.views import api
...


urlpatterns = [
    ...
    path("apis/", api.urls),
    ... 
]

import_from_production.py

This is a reasonably common Django management command pattern that I write. I prefer to use django-click because the click simplifies how to write Python command line interfaces.

We connect to our new endpoint, and if we get a good status code back, we will loop over our results and sync up our database with them.

Please note: I didn’t dive into how to do this security, but you will want to add some protection to your websites unless you are comfortable with it being public.

import djclick as click
import requests
from rich import print

from places.models import Place

# Constants
API_URL = "https://your-website.com/apis/places/"


[@click](https://micro.blog/click)()
@click.option("--limit", type=int, default=100)
def command(limit):
    # Start a requests session
    with requests.Session() as session:
        try:
            params = {"limit": limit}
            response = session.get(API_URL, params=params)
            response.raise_for_status()

            items = response.json()["items"]
            for item in items:
                if "name" in item:
                    name = item["name"]
                    address = item["address"]

                    defaults = dict(item)
					# delete foreign keys	
                    del defaults["cuisines"]
                    del defaults["neighborhood"]

                    try:
                        place, created = Place.objects.update_or_create(
                            name=name, address=address, defaults=defaults
                        )
                        print(f"{name} :: {created=}")

                    except Exception as e:
                        print(f"[red]{e=}[/red]")

        except requests.HTTPError as http_err:
            print(f"HTTP error occurred: {http_err}")

        except Exception as err:
            print(f"An error occurred: {err}")

Fin

Overall, I’m pretty happy with this pattern and Django Ninja. My only nitpick is that I wish that Django Ninja shipped with some class-based view batteries. I find them to be much easier to extend and work from than function-based views, but I’m told some third-party apps are starting to help fill in this space.