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djanorm

A Django-style ORM for Python with first-class async, FastAPI-ready Pydantic schemas, and a tiny dorm CLI. No Django runtime needed.

import dorm

class Author(dorm.Model):
    name = dorm.CharField(max_length=100)
    age = dorm.IntegerField()

# Sync
alice = Author.objects.create(name="Alice", age=30)
adults = Author.objects.filter(age__gte=18).order_by("name")

# Async — every method has an `a*` variant
alice = await Author.objects.acreate(name="Alice", age=30)
async for a in Author.objects.filter(age__gte=18):
    print(a.name)

Where to start

If you're… Read…
brand new Getting started
building a FastAPI app Tutorial: 5 minutes to your first API
coming from Django Migration from Django ORM
looking up what changed in 4.0 What's new in 4.0
not sure which helper to use When to use what
looking up a method API Reference (sidebar)
putting this in prod Production deployment

Why dorm

  • Same QuerySet API as Django — filter, exclude, Q, F, bulk_create, select_related, prefetch_related, signals, the works. If you know Django, you already know dorm.
  • Sync and async — every method has an a* variant. The async pool retries on transient errors and logs slow queries out of the box. AsyncModel rejects sync API for async-only stacks.
  • Type-safe — Field[T] generics + Manager[Self]. The djanorm-mypy plugin validates filter() kwargs against the model and lookup suffixes at compile time.
  • FastAPI-friendly — DormSchema + list_response_schema + nested_schema_for + schema_with_computed. Streaming StreamingResponse directly via dorm.contrib.streaming. No glue.
  • Production hardening built in — circuit breaker, query budget (HTTP SLA timeout), pool task affinity, lag-aware read routing, outbox pattern, hash sharding, idempotency keys, schema-drift detection (dorm diff).
  • Multi-backend — SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, libsql/Turso, and from 4.0 DuckDB (embedded analytics). Same models, same migrations.
  • First-class PG features — COPY FROM/TO, materialised views, declarative partitioning (RANGE/LIST/HASH), async LISTEN/NOTIFY pub-sub, pgvector, HStoreField, native ENUM types, full-text search with trigram + GIN.
  • Zero-downtime migrations — AddFieldOnline + BackfillBatch + SetNotNullOnline for big tables in production.
  • Multi-tenancy — schema-level (dorm.contrib.tenants) or row-level (TenantModel + current_tenant()).
  • Tooling extracted — pytest-djanorm and djanorm-mypy ship as sibling packages so the main wheel never pulls dev tooling (rationale).
  • Pluggable file storage — FileField writes to local disk by default and to AWS S3 / MinIO / Cloudflare R2 / Backblaze B2 by changing settings.STORAGES. Application code doesn't change.

Install

pip install "djanorm[sqlite]"
pip install "djanorm[postgresql]"
pip install "djanorm[duckdb]"                 # embedded analytics (4.0+)
pip install "djanorm[sqlite,postgresql,pydantic]"

# Uploads on AWS S3 / MinIO / R2 / B2
pip install "djanorm[postgresql,s3]"

# Dev tooling (sibling packages)
pip install pytest-djanorm djanorm-mypy

Quick reference