Our database is empty, but right now we don't have any views to add objects to our database. We could do what we did in the last chapter and create a management command, but there's an easier way. I have added three Car objects to the database and then created a dump of this data that you can load. A data dump like this is called a fixture. We'll discuss fixtures in a bit; for now, let's see how to use them to load data in our database.

On your command line, run this command in the project root with the virtual environment activated:

> python manage.py loaddata frontend/fixtures/initial.json
Installed 3 object(s) from 1 fixture(s)

Refresh the web page and now you should see a web page similar to this:

Now we have three cars in our database. You should play around the app for a while. It has a details page for each car and allows you to submit a booking request from the details page.

To learn more about fixtures, take a look at the Django documentation at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/howto/initial-data/. Fixtures are a feature of Django that let you dump the data in your database in simple text files using a number of formats. The most commonly used format is JSON. Once you have a fixture file, you can then use it to populate your database with data, as we did here, using the loaddata command.

Before we move on to admin customization, I want to talk about a couple of new things that I have used in the models for this app. You should take a look at frontend/models.py to see how our models are configured, and then read the following information, which explains the new concepts.