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6. What signals are raised by Django during object creation or update?

Django provides signals which allows hooking into a model objects creation and deletion lifecycle. The signals provided by Django are

  • pre_init

  • post_init

  • pre_save

  • post_save

  • pre_delete

  • post_delete

Among these, the most commonly used signals are pre_save and post_save. We will look into them in detail.

6.1. Signals vs overriding .save

Since signals can be used for similar effects as overriding .save, which one to use is a frequent source of confusion. Here is when you should use which.

  • If you want other people, eg. third party apps, to override or customize the object save behaviour, you should raise your own signals

  • If you are hooking into the save behavior of an app you do not control, you should hook into the post_save or pre_save

  • If you are customizing the save behaviour of apps you control, you should override save.

Lets take an example of a UserToken model. This a class used for providing authentication and should get created whenever a User is created.

class UserToken(models.Model):
    token = models.CharField(max_length=64)

    # ...
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