Documentation on adding default pages in a data migration

It would be great if there was an example somewhere of creating pages via a data migration.

Here’s my attempt point97/marco-portal2/initial_data/migrations/0001_create_ocean_stories_container.py

It is deficient in that the URL doesn’t get set. As a workaround I set live = False, so that the URL gets set on publish. There may be other data consistency issues which I haven’t bumped into yet.

Improvements to this approach?

[gasman]

Idle thought - could we perhaps provide some helper functions for doing tree operations, that live outside of the Page class and are thus usable with the ‘barebones’ Page model that’s available inside migrations? Something like:

from wagtail.wagtailcore.utils import tree_ops

def insert_pages(apps, schema_editor):
    Page = apps.get_model('wagtailcore.Page')
    homepage = Page.objects.get(url_path='/home/')
    new_page = Page(title='new page')
    tree_ops.add_child(homepage, new_page)

As far as I recall, most of the heavy lifting in django-treebeard happens outside the mixin in dedicated classes like AddChildOperation, so we could probably piggyback on those.

[mx-moth]

@kurtrwall For the reasons you have listed, we do not create pages in migrations. Instead we have management commands - one for creating the base site skeleton of required pages, and another that makes some random test pages. As they are management commands, they have full access to the proper models.

We try and keep the site skeleton management command idempotent with respect to existing data, so that running it multiple times as the project grows will have the same effect as running it on a new database. This does take extra work compared to migrations, and kind of duplicates the work of a migration, which is unfortunate.

I’ve not come up with a better solution. If anyone has a better idea, I would also love to hear it.