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')
.