Django: Get model from string?

django.db.models.loading was deprecated in Django 1.7 (removed in 1.9) in favor of the the new application loading system.

Django 1.7 docs give us the following instead:

>>> from django.apps import apps
>>> User = apps.get_model(app_label='auth', model_name='User')
>>> print(User)
<class 'django.contrib.auth.models.User'>

just for anyone getting stuck (like I did):

from django.apps import apps

model = apps.get_model('app_name', 'model_name')

app_name should be listed using quotes, as should model_name (i.e. don't try to import it)

get_model accepts lower case or upper case 'model_name'

As of Django 1.11 to 4.0 (at least), it's AppConfig.get_model(model_name, require_ready=True)

As of Django 1.9 the method is django.apps.AppConfig.get_model(model_name).
-- danihp

As of Django 1.7 the django.db.models.loading is deprecated (to be removed in 1.9) in favor of the the new application loading system.
-- Scott Woodall

---

Found it. It's defined here:

from django.db.models.loading import get_model

Defined as:

def get_model(self, app_label, model_name, seed_cache=True):

Most model "strings" appear as the form "appname.modelname" so you might want to use this variation on get_model

from django.db.models.loading import get_model

your_model = get_model ( *your_string.split('.',1) )

The part of the django code that usually turns such strings into a model is a little more complex This from django/db/models/fields/related.py:

    try:
        app_label, model_name = relation.split(".")
    except ValueError:
        # If we can't split, assume a model in current app
        app_label = cls._meta.app_label
        model_name = relation
    except AttributeError:
        # If it doesn't have a split it's actually a model class
        app_label = relation._meta.app_label
        model_name = relation._meta.object_name

# Try to look up the related model, and if it's already loaded resolve the
# string right away. If get_model returns None, it means that the related
# model isn't loaded yet, so we need to pend the relation until the class
# is prepared.
model = get_model(app_label, model_name,
                  seed_cache=False, only_installed=False)

To me, this appears to be an good case for splitting this out into a single function in the core code. However, if you know your strings are in "App.Model" format, the two liner above will work.