After you defined all your models, tortoise needs you to init them, in order to create backward relations between models and match your db client with appropriate models.

You can do it like this:

from tortoise import Tortoise

async def init():
    # Here we create a SQLite DB using file "db.sqlite3"
    #  also specify the app name of "models"
    #  which contain models from "app.models"
    await Tortoise.init(
        db_url='sqlite://db.sqlite3',
        modules={'models': ['app.models']}
    )
    # Generate the schema
    await Tortoise.generate_schemas()

Here we create connection to SQLite database client and then we discover & initialize models.

generate_schema generates schema on empty database, you shouldn't run it on every app init, run it just once, maybe out of your main code. There is also the option when generating the schemas to set the safe parameter to True which will only insert the tables if they don't already exist.

If you define the variable __models__ in the app.models module (or wherever you specify to load your models from), generate_schema will use that list, rather than automatically finding models for you.

Tortoise ORM will keep connections open to external Databases. As an asyncio Python library, it needs to have the connections closed properly or the Python interpreter may still wait for the completion of said connections.

To ensure connections are closed please ensure that Tortoise.close_connections() is called:

await Tortoise.close_connections()

The small helper function tortoise.run_async() will ensure that connections are closed.

.. automodule:: tortoise
    :members:
    :undoc-members: