The Admin & the ORM

The free admin panel

Django gives you a full admin site for free — a ready-made web dashboard for adding, editing and deleting your data. Getting it working takes just two steps: create an admin user to log in with, then register the model you want to manage.

First, create a superuser. This command asks you for a username, email and password in the terminal:

python manage.py createsuperuser    # make an admin login

A superuser is an admin account that can log into /admin and do anything. Next, tell the admin which model to show by registering it:

# blog/admin.py
from django.contrib import admin
from .models import Post

admin.site.register(Post)

We import the Post model and call admin.site.register(Post). That single line tells the admin to build add/edit/delete screens for posts automatically.

Getting the admin working, step by step:

1. Run python manage.py createsuperuser and answer the prompts to make an admin account (username, email, password).
2. In blog/admin.py, import your model and call admin.site.register(Post) so the admin knows about it.
3. Start the server with python manage.py runserver and open http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin in your browser.
4. Log in with the superuser you just created.
5. Click Posts to add, edit and delete records through the ready-made screens — no extra code needed.

Query with the ORM

The ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) lets you read and write the database using plain Python instead of SQL. Every model gets an objects manager with handy methods:

Post.objects.all()                 # all posts
Post.objects.get(id=1)             # one post
Post.objects.filter(title="Hi")    # matching posts
Post.objects.create(title="New", body="...")   # create

What each line does: all() fetches every post. get(id=1) fetches the one post with that id (and errors if there is not exactly one). filter(title="Hi") fetches all posts whose title is "Hi" (could be zero, one, or many). create(...) makes a brand-new post and saves it to the database in one step.