Creating Django models in a directory

When I am organizing my code, I like to separate objects into files and group them based on responsibility. With Django out of the box, they expect all the models to be in the models.py file. This is less than desirable as large apps can have many models and this file can get out of hand. I like to separate my models into their own files but there is a little work involved.

In Django versions < 1.7, there were two requirements to get models to be recognized. First, in the model itself, an app_label was required in the Meta class. The app_label was required to be the name of the installed app (directory above the models directory). For example:

# code_camp/models/speaker.py

from django.db import models

class Speaker(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)

    # only required in Django versions < 1.7
    class Meta(object):
        app_label = 'code_camp'

The second requirement is that the model needs to be in the models module (the __init__.py in the models directory). In Django versions >= 1.7, this is the only requirement to register the model with the installed app.

# code_camp/models/__init__.py

from .speaker import Speaker as _Speaker

I like to import the Speaker as _Speaker because this prevents people from simply importing the model like so:

# will not work
from code_camp.models import Speaker

# only way to access Speaker model
from code_camp.models.speaker import Speaker

Since Python is an explicit language, I prefer to import the object from the original location instead of through another import.