How to rename items in values() in Django?

It's a bit hacky, but you could use the extra method:

MyModel.objects.extra(
  select={
    'renamed_value': 'cryptic_value_name'
  }
).values(
  'renamed_value'
)

This basically does SELECT cryptic_value_name AS renamed_value in the SQL.

Another option, if you always want the renamed version but the db has the cryptic name, is to name your field with the new name but use db_column to refer to the original name in the db.

From django>=1.8 you can use annotate and F object

from django.db.models import F

MyModel.objects.annotate(renamed_value=F('cryptic_value_name')).values('renamed_value')

Also extra() is going to be deprecated, from the django docs:

This is an old API that we aim to deprecate at some point in the future. Use it only if you cannot express your query using other queryset methods. If you do need to use it, please file a ticket using the QuerySet.extra keyword with your use case (please check the list of existing tickets first) so that we can enhance the QuerySet API to allow removing extra(). We are no longer improving or fixing bugs for this method.

Without using any other manager method (tested on v3.0.4):

from django.db.models import F

MyModel.objects.values(renamed_value=F('cryptic_value_name'))

Excerpt from Django docs:

An F() object represents the value of a model field or annotated column. It makes it possible to refer to model field values and perform database operations using them without actually having to pull them out of the database into Python memory.