What causes "Unknown command: 'mkmigrations'" in Django? - django

Question

When attempting to view my Django app while being served locally I am encountering this error:
A server error occurred. Please contact the administrator.
It remains that way even when debug is false. The console shows:
django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Module "django.contrib.auth.
are" does not define a "SessionAuthenticationMiddleware" attribute/class
and searching around I came across the suggestion to comment out
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
# 'django.contrib.auth.middleware.SessionAuthenticationMiddleware',
'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
'django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware',
)
This does indeed fix the problem, in that the app does display, however when I go to the admin panel I get the message:
Site administration
You don't have permission to edit anything.
I figured I would just try and roll back to the last commit before I pushed the app to heroku and ran:
git reset --hard 'appropriate commit'
This did not seem to do anything at all. I still have the same situation as previously. Furthermore running:
python manage.py makemigrations
or
python manage.py migrate
results in
Unknown command: 'makemigrations'
Type 'manage.py help' for usage.
and
Unknown command: 'migrate'
Type 'manage.py help' for usage.
Previously both of these commands worked just fine.
If it helps, I was trying to install addthis to the app when things started breaking. Also after the git reset when I type git status I get:
Untracked files:
blog/migrations/0005_join_ip_address.py
blog/migrations/0006_auto_20150318_1716.py
blog/migrations/0007_remove_join_ip_address.py
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
Other details:
Django 1.6.5
Python 3.4.1 |Anaconda 2.1.0
Using a Virtualenv
Any help would be massively appreciated.

Answer 1

As others have noticed, your Django version should be 1.7; this is caused by your installation of django-addthis.
The current version of django-addthis explicitly states Django<=1.6.5 as a dependency. For some reason, this prompts pip to downgrade your installation:
$ pip install django-addthis
Downloading/unpacking django-addthis
Downloading django-addthis-2.0.0.tar.gz
Running setup.py (path:...) egg_info for package django-addthis
Downloading/unpacking Django>=1.4,<=1.6.5 (from django-addthis)
Downloading Django-1.6.5-py2.py3-none-any.whl (6.7MB): 6.7MB downloaded
Installing collected packages: django-addthis, Django
Running setup.py install for django-addthis
Found existing installation: Django 1.7.5
Uninstalling Django:
Successfully uninstalled Django
Successfully installed django-addthis Django
The last four lines show what happened when I tried this on one of my own Django 1.7 projects. pip happily downgrades your Django app. And since virtualenv dependencies are usually not stored in Git, you won't see this when you do a git status.
The only solution is to uninstall django-addthis and reinstall the correct Django version:
$ pip uninstall django-addthis && pip install --upgrade -r requirements.txt

Answer 2

You are running a Django 1.7 project against an installed version of 1.6. Upgrade your Django installation.