Django 1.8: Create initial migrations for existing schema

by

Finally got it to work, although I don’t know why and I hope it will work in the future.
After doing numerous trials and going through Django’s dev site (link).
Here are the steps (for whoever runs into this problem):

  1. Empty the django_migrations table: delete from django_migrations;
  2. For every app, delete its migrations folder: rm -rf <app>/migrations/
  3. Reset the migrations for the “built-in” apps: python manage.py migrate --fake
  4. For each app run: python manage.py makemigrations <app>. Take care of dependencies (models with ForeignKey’s should run after their parent model).
  5. Finally: python manage.py migrate --fake-initial

After that I ran the last command without the --fake-initial flag, just to make sure.

Now everything works and I can use the migrations system normally.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who encounters this issue. It must be documented better and even simplified.

Update for Django 1.9 users:
I had this scenario again with a Django 1.9.4, and step 5 failed.
All I had to do is replace --fake-initial with --fake to make it work.

More Related Contents:

  1. How to revert the last migration?
  2. Django migrate –fake and –fake-initial explained
  3. django 1.7 migrate gets error “table already exists”
  4. How to reset migrations in Django 1.7
  5. Django data migration when changing a field to ManyToMany
  6. Disable migrations when running unit tests in Django 1.7
  7. Creating Partial Indexes with Django 1.7
  8. Django Migrations Add Field with Default as Function of Model
  9. Django Programming error column does not exist even after running migrations
  10. How to simplify migrations in Django 1.7?
  11. Django: Populate user ID when saving a model
  12. Manager isn’t available; User has been swapped for ‘pet.Person’
  13. How do you serialize a model instance in Django?
  14. Django migration strategy for renaming a model and relationship fields
  15. What is the right way to use angular2 http requests with Django CSRF protection?
  16. django admin login suddenly demanding csrf token
  17. How to cURL an Authenticated Django App?
  18. How to register users in Django REST framework?
  19. Example of Django Class-Based DeleteView
  20. Accelerate bulk insert using Django’s ORM?
  21. Django admin DoesNotExist at /admin/
  22. Pass request context to serializer from Viewset in Django Rest Framework
  23. UnicodeEncodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t encode character
  24. How can I upload and download files with graphene-django?
  25. Django give Error 500 for all static files like CSS and Images, when DEBUG is False
  26. Authorization Credentials Stripped — django, elastic beanstalk, oauth
  27. How to use if/else condition on Django Templates?
  28. Django query case-insensitive list match
  29. Django/DRF – 405 Method not allowed on DELETE operation
  30. Django: Using F arguments in datetime.timedelta inside a query

Leave a Comment