rlucas.net: The Next Generation

Django provides a handy “shell” which can be invoked using the manage.py for a project, and which will usefully setup the necessary Django environment and even invoke ipython for completion, syntax highlighting, debugger, etc.

Also usefully, but very much separate from the shell functionality, Django provides a nice framework for dealing with database transactions through its ORM. One can use django.db.transaction.rollback() for example.

However, the shell by default will be invoked with autocommit, meaning that each individual SQL statement gets committed. When one is poking around freehand in the shell, this might not be for the best, so one may want to turn off autocommit and resort to the choice of being able to rollback().

Unfortunately for that use case, all of the Django infrastructure for beginning database transactions is focused on how to begin a transaction in your code, where it rightly would be expected to be within a function or at least a “with” block. Hence, the docs and the code focus on using decorators, e.g. “@transaction.commit_on_success” or context managers, e.g. “with transaction.commit_on_success():“. Obviously not helpful in the shell / REPL.

If you are in your “manage.py shell” and need to do some romping around in your single-database Django app while being wrapped up in the warm fuzzy security blanket of a DB transaction lest you fat-finger something, you can get the same effect for your subsequent few commands in the shell with:

from django.db import transaction
transaction.enter_transaction_management()
transaction.managed(True)
# do stuff
imp = my_models.ImportantObject(title="Emabrassing Tpyos In the Titel")
imp.save()
# oops
transaction.rollback()
# this is too stressful, let's quit
transaction.leave_transaction_management()

Caveats: this only works in a one-database-connection setup where using the default connection does what you want; newer versions of Django may have a nice way to do this; don’t trust my random blog post with your production data!