Overview

Django 5.2 LTS, released on April 2, 2025, is a long-term support release. It introduces composite primary keys, automatic model imports in the shell, and ORM improvements.

Main Features

Composite primary keys

Django finally supports composite primary keys via CompositePrimaryKey. This simplifies modeling join tables and existing schemas.

python 
from django.db import models

class Enrollment(models.Model):
    student = models.ForeignKey('Student', on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    course = models.ForeignKey('Course', on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    date = models.DateField(auto_now_add=True)

    class Meta:
        pk = models.CompositePrimaryKey('student_id', 'course_id')

Automatic model imports in shell

The python manage.py shell command automatically imports all project models, avoiding repetitive manual imports.

python 
# python manage.py shell
# All models are automatically available:

# >>> User.objects.count()
# 42
# >>> Article.objects.filter(published=True).count()
# 15
# No more: from myapp.models import User, Article

ORM improvements

The ORM benefits from new query expressions and performance optimizations for complex joins.

python 
from django.db.models import Q, F

# More expressive queries
articles = Article.objects.filter(
    Q(published=True) & Q(views__gte=F('min_views'))
).select_related('author').only('title', 'author__name')

Sources