Question

When I ask the model manager to get an object, it raises DoesNotExist when there is no matching object.

go = Content.objects.get(name="baby")

Instead of DoesNotExist, how can I have go be None instead?

Answer 1

There is no ‘built in’ way to do this. Django will raise the DoesNotExist exception every time.
The idiomatic way to handle this in python is to wrap it in a try catch:

try:
    go = SomeModel.objects.get(foo='bar')
except SomeModel.DoesNotExist:
    go = None

What I did do, is to subclass models.Manager, create a safe_get like the code above and use that manager for my models. That way you can write: SomeModel.objects.safe_get(foo='bar').