Return final management command result from call_command

[Claude Paroz]

Currently, the result returned from the handle method of a management command is directed by default to the console in the execute method by writing to self.stdout, but it is not returned from the execute method, so call_command does not receive it either.

I would suggest to adapt this behavior and also return this output from execute (and consequently by call_command so we can easily get access to this result from call_command). The behavior when calling the command by the command line would be unchanged.

I even thought about not writing this result to self.stdout when the command is called by call_command, but this would be backwards incompatible and I don't see a good deprecation path for this.

[Tim Graham]

Would this be an alternative to the currently documented method of:

with open('/path/to/command_output') as f:
    management.call_command('dumpdata', stdout=f)

or is there some other difference?

[Claude Paroz]

Only the return value of the command handle() method would be returned from call_command.

In the current Django commands, only the following are returning some content: diffsettings, sqlflush, sqlmigrate, sqlsequencereset, changepassword (success message), findstatic. Other commands are calling self.stdout.write during the processing of the command.

To get all the content output by a command, you still have to provide a catcher in the sdtout argument as you mentioned.

[Tim Graham]

I guess I don't have any objections other than I always found the return value of handle() to be somewhat inconsistent and ill-defined as to when that should be preferred instead of having the handle() method itself do the logging.

[Claude Paroz]

​PR

[Claude Paroz <claude@…>]

In b46c0ea6:

Fixed #26190 -- Returned handle() result from call_command

Thanks Tim Graham for the review.

[Claude Paroz <claude@…>]

In 269b5f2:

Used call_command return value in staticfiles tests

Refs #26190.