Recently, I have been doing a lot of Django formwork. I start with a basic template like form.as_div or form|crispy until it grows uncomfortable.

Today, I was bouncing between two projects, and I noticed I was working on the tasks that had grown uncomfortable to the point that I dreaded working on the templates.

While I enjoy working with Django’s template system, I was putting off these tasks, and all they had in common was finishing some of the form and template work.

I couldn’t quite understand why this was such a mental blocker, so I stopped working, disconnected, and mowed my yard. Thankfully, that did the trick.

As I finished mowing, I realized that I was struggling to complete these tasks because I was overwhelmed by needing to dump all the form fields into a template.

Once I realized why I was feeling this resistance, I realized I needed to focus on solving this issue to move on.

I remembered Daniel Roy Greenfeld’s Rapidly creating smoke tests for Django views from a few weeks ago, where he made a management command to print out a bunch of smoke tests.

I decided to try the same technique by passing a string path to a Django ModelForm and printing out my form template.

Edit: micro.blog did not like the templates in templates from my Python script, so I had to swap out the inline example with a gist. Sorry about that.

This template could be better, but it was good enough. I tested it on a few of the forms I’m using on Django News Jobs, and it’s an improvement over what I started with.

Something was in the water because when I checked our company Slack, Frank Wiles showed me his new make-management-command project, which takes a similar approach to creating the folders and files needed to create a new management command.