How to customize the shell command

The Django shell is an interactive Python environment that provides access to models and settings, making it useful for testing code, experimenting with queries, and interacting with application data.

Customizing the shell command allows adding extra functionality or pre-loading specific modules. To do this, create a new management command that subclasses django.core.management.commands.shell.Command and overrides the existing shell management command. For more details, refer to the guide on overriding commands.

Customize automatic imports

New in Django 5.2.

To customize the automatic import behavior of the shell management command, override the get_auto_imports() method. This method should return a sequence of import paths for objects or modules available in the application. For example:

polls/management/commands/shell.py
from django.core.management.commands import shell


class Command(shell.Command):
    def get_auto_imports(self):
        return super().get_auto_imports() + [
            "django.urls.reverse",
            "django.urls.resolve",
        ]

The customization above adds resolve() and reverse() to the default namespace, which already includes all models from the apps listed in INSTALLED_APPS. These objects will be available in the shell without requiring a manual import.

Running this customized shell command with verbosity=2 would show:

8 objects imported automatically:

  from django.contrib.admin.models import LogEntry
  from django.contrib.auth.models import Group, Permission, User
  from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType
  from django.contrib.sessions.models import Session
  from django.urls import resolve, reverse

If an overridden shell command includes paths that cannot be imported, these errors are shown when verbosity is set to 1 or higher.

Note that automatic imports can be disabled for a specific shell session using the --no-imports flag. To permanently disable automatic imports, override get_auto_imports() to return None:

class Command(shell.Command):
    def get_auto_imports(self):
        return None
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