Create Wagtail pages programmatically

This short recipe demonstrates how to create Wagtail pages programmatically. It may also be useful for testing Wagtail development against a reasonable volume of page data (about 35,000 film plots, from English Wikipedia).

Instructions

In a virtualenv:

pip install wagtail
wagtail start wagtailfilms
cd wagtailfilms
./manage.py migrate
./manage.py createsuperuser
./manage.py startapp films

add films to INSTALLED_APPS in wagtailfilms/settings/base.py

Edit films/models.py:

from django.db import models

from wagtail.models import Page
from wagtail.fields import RichTextField
from wagtail.admin.panels import FieldPanel


class FilmIndexPage(Page):
    pass


class FilmPage(Page):
    parent_page_types = ["films.FilmIndexPage"]

    release_year = models.IntegerField("Release year")
    director = models.CharField(max_length=250, blank=True)
    wiki_page = models.URLField()
    plot = RichTextField(blank=True)

    content_panels = Page.content_panels + [
        FieldPanel("release_year"),
        FieldPanel("director"),
        FieldPanel("wiki_page"),
        FieldPanel("plot", classname="full"),
    ]
    
    search_auto_update = False

Migrate the changes:

./manage.py makemigrations
./manage.py migrate

mkdir -p films/management/commands
touch films/management/commands/importfilms.py

Edit importfilms.py:

import csv
from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand
from wagtail.core.models import Page
from films.models import FilmIndexPage, FilmPage


class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = "Imports 35k film plots from Wikipedia"

    def handle(self, *args, **options):
        # delete existing film index pages and film pages
        FilmPage.objects.all().delete()
        FilmIndexPage.objects.all().delete()
        # create a film index page
        home = Page.objects.get(id=3)
        films_index_page = FilmIndexPage(title="Films")
        home.add_child(instance=films_index_page)
        films_index_page.save_revision().publish()
        # import film pages
        reader = csv.DictReader(open("wiki_movie_plots_deduped.csv"))
        for row in reader:
            film_page = FilmPage(
                title=row["Title"],
                release_year=row["Release Year"],
                director=row["Director"],
                wiki_page=row["Wiki Page"],
                plot=row["Plot"],
            )
            films_index_page.add_child(instance=film_page)
            film_page.save_revision().publish()
            print("published film page " + row["Title"])

Download and unzip wiki_movie_plots_deduped.csv from https://www.kaggle.com/jrobischon/wikipedia-movie-plots.

Create the film index page and import the films:

./manage.py importfilms

To load the same data more quickly in another environment, first export it with Django's dumpdata command:

./manage.py dumpdata --natural-foreign --natural-primary --indent 2 \
    -e contenttypes -e auth.permission \
    -e wagtailcore.groupcollectionpermission \
    -e wagtailcore.grouppagepermission -e wagtailimages.rendition \
    -e wagtailsearch.sqliteftsindexentry \
    -e sessions > films.json

Then ./manage.py loaddata films.json.

tomdyson/wagtail-import-data.md

Create Wagtail pages programmatically

Instructions