TLDR: Setting mutable objects at Django Model Field default

Published on April 25, 2018

This post it the result of a bug that haunted me for three months until I finally could isolate the error properly, and get to the root of the issue.

One of the core parameters of a Django Model field is the default. It sets the value of the Field when you don’t pass a value to it at the Model instance creation. The default parameter can receive a value or a callable, and callable are functions or any object that implements the __call__ method.

That said, let’s go to the tip:

Never use a mutable object as default. Because if you do that, every instance of the model will share the same object during the code execution.

If you want to use them as default, use the callable instead:

# Wrong
class SomeClass(models.Model):
    custom_data = JSONField(default={})

# Right
class SomeClass(models.Model):
    custom_data = JSONField(default=dict)

The bigger problem with this kind of mistake is that it causes at most cases a silent bug that will come back to haunt you when you least expect. So check your default parameters!

Bonus

You can’t use lambda functions as the default because they are not serializable during the creation of the migrations. If you need to use a more elaborated value as default consider creating a function to use as an argument. But, remember to pass the function as the argument (ex.: default=create_default), not its result (ex.: default=create_default()).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuition-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .