How to solve faulty Django makemigrations in production - django

Right now I'm in development so frequently make changes to models, edit, delete, etc.
However often even with makemigrations and migrate Django doesn't pick up on the changes I've made.
Sometimes running python manage.py migrate --run-syncdb will solve it (yes I know this has been depreciated but it still works which is why I use it as a last resort) but sometimes it doesn't and I have to delete the sqlite database and migrate from scratch.
Obviously in production this not going to be possible and I'd like to know the best way to deal with this.
The question that has been suggested to me as a duplicate is from 2012 and the answers are no longer relevant.

Related

Run reverse Django migration on Heroku after release failure

I have a running Django application on Heroku with migrations auto-run on release. While in most times this works fine sometimes there is a problem when:
There are more than one migration in given release (they can be in different apps)
Some migration will fail, but not the first one
In this case manage.py migrate will fail so Heroku will not finish the release and will not deploy the new code. This means that code is in the old version and the database is in the state "somewhere between old and new".
Is there a simple way to autorun Django run reversed migrations in case of the failure of the release command on Heroku?
Transactions won't help here as there might be more than one migration (multiple apps) and Django run each migration in seperate transaction.
As I couldn't find any existing solutions I am posting a gist I have written to solve this.
https://gist.github.com/pax0r/0591855e73b9892c28d3e3cdd15f4985
The code stores the state of migrations before running the migration and in case of any exception reverts back to this state. It also checks if all migrations are reversible during the migrate step.
It's not yet well tested, but I will work forward to create a library from it for easier use by others.

Difficulty with Django Migrations

What are some good best practices to prevent the following.
Often, during django development I use postgres. If I roll back to an earlier commit, often new migrations will break things irreparably, because the postgres context is unknown to the older code. I have tried the syncdb etc, I have tried makemigrations on single apps, but neither seem to fix the problem.
Also, if creating a new postgres db and deleting all the migrations and pycache folders, this too often causes problems that are not straightforward to fix.
Is the answer to simply use sqlite during development, has anyone else encountered this?
Details: django 2.0.5 postgres: most current.

How to update database (postgresql) of a deployed django-app, after modifying a model?

I'm having trouble with my Django-app that's been deployed.
It was working fine but I had to do a minor modification (augmented the max_length) of a Charfield of some model. I did migrations and everything was working fine in the local version.
Then I commited the changes without a problem and the mentioned field of the web version now accepts more characters, as expected, but whenever I click the save button a Server Error rises.
I assume I have to do some kind of migration/DB update for the web version but I don't seem to find how.
(I'm working with Django 1.11, postgresql 9.6, and DigitalOcean).
EDIT
I've just realized that the 'minor modification' also included a field deletion in the model.
Short answer
You have to run
python manage.py migrate
on the server, too. Before you do that, make sure all migration scripts you have locally are also present on the server.
Explanation
After changing the model, you probably locally ran
python manage.py makemigrations
This creates migration scripts that'll transform database schema accordingly. Hopefully, you've committed these newly created scripts to Git, together with the changed model. (If not, you can still do so now.)
after running makemigrations (either before or after committing, that shouldn't matter), you've probably locally ran
python manage.py migrate
This applies the migration scripts to the database that haven't been applied to it, yet. (The information which ones have already been applied is stored in the database itself.)
You probably (and hopefully) haven't checked in your local database into Git, so when you pushed your tracked changes to a remote repo and pulled them down on your server (or however else the new Git revisions got there), the changes to the server database haven't happened, yet. So you have to repeat the last local step (migrate) on the server.
Further reading
For more information, refer to the Django 1.11 documentation w.r.t. migrations. (You can e.g. limit migration creation or migration application to a single Django app, instead of the whole Django project.) To get the grip of these things, I can recomment the free Django Girls tutorial.

Does Django 1.10 still need South to manage migrations?

I am following online instructions on starting a Django project the right way.
The instructions are based on an earlier version of Django. From my (admittedly limited) knowledge of Django. The latest release of Django (1.10 at the time of posing this question), already handles migrations seemingly well - by way of the manage.py script.
My question then is this: Do I still need to install South to manage my migrations, or can I simply skip that part of the instructions, and use manage.py to deal with my db schema changes?
No, South was for Django before 1.7. With 1.10 everything you would have used it for is baked into Django itself.

Upgrading from Django1.3 to 1.8 - Are migrations mandatory?

My application has been on production for 3 years and the DB model is stable. It seems to me that adding migrations support is more pain that it is worth.
Is it possible/desirable to upgrade without migrations support?
The good old syncdb command is still there. If all you need is to add/drop tables(models), you can continue to use that. The new migration support doesn't make any difference to you if you don't create any migrations (with makemigration and migrate commands).
That said, enabling migration is still recommended. You never know when your schema will change, even for a stable DB model. If you don't like Django's builtin migration solution, try south, which was the de facto standard, and have been proven solid.