You can seed with JSON files as "fixtures" and run `python manage.py loaddata fixturename`.
The thing I wish Django had better OOTB support for is background tasks, I've not used it but I understand this is very well done in Rails and Laravel.
Interesting! I will give fixtures a look. I've shied away because -- unless you introduce a manual step to generate them, my understanding is that they're static.
You're spot on about background jobs. Rails added support 2-3 major versions ago and there's no shortage of back-ends. With Django, it seems to be Celery-or-bust and there's no Django API that I'm aware of. I actually recently rolled my own solution using SQS and a dedicated compose service which runs a management script (in the Django context). It works but ... it's klunky, the API is ad hoc and there's no monitoring/retries/etc.
The thing I wish Django had better OOTB support for is background tasks, I've not used it but I understand this is very well done in Rails and Laravel.