Get model's fields in Django

_meta is private, but it's relatively stable. There are efforts to formalise it, document it and remove the underscore, which might happen before 1.3 or 1.4. I imagine effort will be made to ensure things are backwards compatible, because lots of people have been using it anyway.

If you're particularly concerned about compatibility, write a function that takes a model and returns the fields. This means if something does change in the future, you only have to change one function.

def get_model_fields(model):
    return model._meta.fields

I believe this will return a list of Field objects. To get the value of each field from the instance, use getattr(instance, field.name).

Update: Django contributors are working on an API to replace the _Meta object as part of a Google Summer of Code. See:
- https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/django-developers/hD4roZq0wyk
- https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/new_meta_api

I know this post is pretty old, but I just cared to tell anyone who is searching for the same thing that there is a public and official API to do this: get_fields() and get_field()

Usage:

fields = model._meta.get_fields()
my_field = model._meta.get_field('my_field')

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/ref/models/meta/

get_fields() returns a tuple and each element is a Model field type, which can't be used directly as a string. So, field.name will return the field name

my_model_fields = [field.name for field in MyModel._meta.get_fields()]
The above code will return a list conatining all fields name

Example

In [11]: from django.contrib.auth.models import User

In [12]: User._meta.get_fields()
Out[12]: 
(<ManyToOneRel: admin.logentry>,
 <django.db.models.fields.AutoField: id>,
 <django.db.models.fields.CharField: password>,
 <django.db.models.fields.DateTimeField: last_login>,
 <django.db.models.fields.BooleanField: is_superuser>,
 <django.db.models.fields.CharField: username>,
 <django.db.models.fields.CharField: first_name>,
 <django.db.models.fields.CharField: last_name>,
 <django.db.models.fields.EmailField: email>,
 <django.db.models.fields.BooleanField: is_staff>,
 <django.db.models.fields.BooleanField: is_active>,
 <django.db.models.fields.DateTimeField: date_joined>,
 <django.db.models.fields.related.ManyToManyField: groups>,
 <django.db.models.fields.related.ManyToManyField: user_permissions>)

In [13]: [field.name for field in User._meta.get_fields()]
Out[13]: 
['logentry',
 'id',
 'password',
 'last_login',
 'is_superuser',
 'username',
 'first_name',
 'last_name',
 'email',
 'is_staff',
 'is_active',
 'date_joined',
 'groups',
 'user_permissions']