Mastering Django: Core

Integrating Django with a legacy database

While Django is best suited for developing new applications, it's quite possible to integrate it into legacy databases. Django includes a couple of utilities to automate as much of this process as possible.

Once you've got Django set up, you'll follow this general process to integrate with an existing database.

Give Django your database parameters

You'll need to tell Django what your database connection parameters are, and what the name of the database is. Do that by editing the DATABASES setting and assigning values to the following keys for the 'default' connection:

• NAME
• ENGINE <DATABASE-ENGINE>
• USER
• PASSWORD
• HOST
• PORT

Auto-generate the models

Django comes with a utility called inspectdb that can create models ...