One common mistake is thinking that you need a fully-fleshed-out dataset with real data. You don't. You just need the bare-bones structure with some generic dat

One common mistake is thinking that you need a fully-fleshed-out dataset with real data. You don't. You just need the bare-bones structure with some generic data, which can easily be accomplished with a seed file. Django calls these fixtures: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/howto/initial-data/ https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/howto/initial-data/. Once the initial data is seeded, you then just need to implement migrations to update the database as the structure is modified. These too are already built into Django: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/topics/migrations/ https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/topics/migrations/. With those in place, every developer can have their own local environment with its own database. I personally use Nanobox (https://nanobox.io https://nanobox.io) to spin up dev environments with local databases. I then can console into the environment, run the seeding process and any migrations I need too. You just need to set up a version control workflow to keep everybody's codebase in sync.