🎯Aim

Have an easy way to start a shell with all the relevant models (and maybe other helpers) autoloaded.

📕Context

The django-extensions project provides a nice autoloading of models etc when using the shell_plus command. However, django-extensions also includes a whole grab-bag of other stuff we don't necessarily want to include.

There are potentially a couple of ways to do this.

One we have used previously is to include an ipython_config.py in the root of the project so a shell started there will autoload the models. The code (thanks @a-musing-moose ) is:

"""
An IPython config script to import settings and models

When IPython is installed Django will automatically use it when you ask for a `shell`. This little
ipython config script is loaded by IPython on startup and will import the Django settings and all
the registered models.

Warning: You will get errors if you try to run IPython directly as the Django framework will not
have been properly bootstrapped.
"""
c = get_config()  # noqa
c.InteractiveShellApp.exec_lines = [
    "from django.conf import settings",
    "print('\\nImported \u001b[32;1msettings\u001b[0m from \u001b[37;1mdjango.conf\u001b[0m')",
    "from django.apps import apps",
    "import itertools",
    "globals().update({m.__name__: m for m in apps.get_models()})",
    "print(\"\\n\".join(['Imported \u001b[32;1m' + ', '.join([m.__name__ for m in g]) + f'\u001b[0m from \u001b[37;1m{k}\u001b[0m' for k, g in itertools.groupby(sorted(apps.get_models(), key=lambda m: m._meta.app_label), key=lambda m: m._meta.app_label)]))",
]

We could potentially approximately duplicate the functionality of the shell_plus part of django-extensions (but rewritten in such a way as to ensure no licensing problems).

Or we could just include django-extensions as a dev-only requirement (but we'd want to make sure we test without it!)

📝Relevant resources/doc's/people

Slack thread where django-extensions came up (although it was talking more about generating a graph of the model relationships): https://ackama.slack.com/archives/CV0H0QML7/p1709941586747639
Django extensions itself: https://django-extensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

✅Acceptance Criteria

• A Django shell can easily be started with models already imported and ready for use (and possibly some other helper libraries?)