Custom management command in Dja

In Django project we used management command in many cases.

Like, to create an application

python manage.py startapp my_app

To start webserver

python manage.py runserver

And there are other commands like this. But sometime we need to write a custom management command for our application that execute our own actions.

In a project directory there have a application my_app
Like, my_project/my_app/

Now in my_app directory create a new directory called management and add a _init__.py blank file. Then inside management directory create a new directory commands and add a __init__.py blank file.

Inside the commands directory we will create our management script that will executable using manage.py command.

Lets create a file inside commands directory commands/date_now.py

First import BaseCommand from django.core.management.base and import datetime. Now create a class Command that extend BaseCommand class and write a function called handle. When we execute manage.py date_now the handle function will run.

from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand
import datetime


class Command(BaseCommand):
    def handle(self, *args, **options):
        print datetime.datetime.now()

Now we can execute our management using

python manage.py date_now