Besides not suffering from some of the disadvantages of doctests, unit tests provide some additional useful features for Django applications. One of these features is the ability to load the database with test data prior to the test run. There are a few different ways this can be done; each is discussed in detail in the following sections.
The first way to provide test data for unit tests is to load them from files, called fixtures. We will cover this method by first developing an example test that can benefit from pre-loaded test data, then showing how to create a fixture file, and finally describing how to ensure that the fixture file is loaded as part of the test.