Django get models by model name

Question

In Django I know that there is one and only one model with name foo, but I don't know the app that this model is registered with! How can I get the model with only model_name?

Answer 1

As the answers to Django: Get model from string? show, you need either the app_name string or an AppConfig object to get a model from model_name.

However, you can use apps.get_app_configs() to iterate over AppConfig instances, so something like this is possible:

from django.apps import apps

for app_conf in apps.get_app_configs():
    try:
        foo_model = app_conf.get_model('foo')
        break # stop as soon as it is found
    except LookupError:
        # no such model in this application
        pass

Note that this iterable will include base django apps that are in INSTALLED_APPS like admin, auth, contenttypes, sessions, messages and staticfiles.