How to reset migrations in Django 1.7

(I know there is a title the same as this, but the question is different).

I have managed to get my development machine migrations and production migrations out of sync.

I have a Django app which was using South. I had my own workflow that worked fine (it probably wasn't the correct way to do things, but I had no problems with it).

Basically I have a script that copies the production database dump to my development machine. It also copied the migration files. That way the two were in synch, and I could run South commands as normal.

Now I have upgraded to 1.7, and started using migrations. When I use my previous workflow (copy database dump, and migration files from production), it is not detecting changes on my development machine.

I have read through the migrations document, and I see that the correct way to use it is to

1. run "make migrations" and "migrate" on my development machine.
2. run "migrate" on my devlopemnt machine to actually make the database changes
3. Copy changes over, including migration files.
4. run "migrate" on the production machine. (without the "makemigrations" step)

Anyway. It is all a mess now. I would like to "reset" my migrations and start from scratch, doing things properly from now on.

What do I need to do?

1. Delete the contents of the migration table (on both machines)?
2. Delete the contents of the migration folder? (Including the init.py file).
3. Start the migrations as per the documentation for a new one.

Have I missed anything? Is there a reason why copying everything from production(database and migration files) doesn't detect any changes on my development machine afterwards

I would just do the following on both the environments (as long as the code is the same)

1. Delete your migrations folder
2. DELETE FROM django_migrations WHERE app = <your app name> . You could alternatively just truncate this table.
3. python manage.py makemigrations
4. python manage.py migrate --fake

After this all your changes should get detected across environments.

Run

python manage.py migrate your_app zero

This will drop all tables from your_app

If you want, since you said you want to start over, you can delete your migrations folder, or maybe rename the folder, create a new migrations folder and run

python manage.py makemigrations your_app
python manage.py migrate your_app

Just like south, you can always go back and forth...

# Go to the first migration
python manage.py migrate your_app 0001

# Go to the third migration
python manage.py migrate your_app 0003

So imagine that your 4th migration is a mess... you can always migrate to the 3rd, remove the 4th migration file and do it again.

Note:

This one of the reasons your models should be in different apps. Say you have 2 models : User and Note. It's a good practice to create 2 apps: users and notes so the migrations are independent from each other.

Try not use a single application for all your models

A minor variation on harshil's answer:

$ manage.py migrate --fake <appname> zero
$ rm -rf migrations
$ manage.py makemigrations <appname>
$ manage.py migrate --fake <appname>

This will ...

• pretend to rollback all of your migrations without touching the actual tables in the app
• remove your existing migration scripts for the app
• create a new initial migration for the app
• fake a migration to the initial migration for the app

To reset all migrations and start all over, you can run the following:

1. Reset all migration

python manage.py migrate <app_name> zero

> ℹ️ If this is causing you issues you can add the --fake flag to the end of the command.

2. Create the migration

python manage.py makemigrations <app_name>

> ℹ️ Only do this step if you deleted or altered the migrations files

3. Migrate

python manage.py migrate <app_name>

> ⚠️ if you added the --fake command to step # 1 you will need to add --fake-initial to the migrate command so python manage.py migrate <app_name> --fake-initial

I had a similar issue to this but when testing some of these same solutions using python manage.py showmigrations I noticed I got the same error.

Eventually I found this post which helped me realize I was overcomplicating things and essentially had two User models defined.

So this solution worked for me today.

1. Drop the django migrations table called "django_migrations" (No need to drop the whole database - just the migration table.)

2. Deleted all migrations files (e.g. 0002_auto.py, etc) from all your apps, leave the __init__.py files. You can use this code from Ahmed Bouchefra:

   find . -path "/migrations/.py" -not -name "init.py" -delete

   find . -path "/migrations/.pyc" -delete

(This find and delete code works only for linux. For Windows you have to delete your files manually.)

3. Now run the following commands:

   python manage.py makemigrations
   
   python manage.py migrate --fake
   

django will create a new migration table and fake the initial migration into the table without touching your existing data. Enjoy.

if you want to totally reset the database and the schema then put the code in any app like this

app/management/commands/resetdb.py

import os
import glob
import shutil
from django.conf import settings
from django.core.management.base import BaseCommand, CommandError
from django.db import connection


class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = 'Resets the database'

    def handle(self, *args, **options):
        dbname = settings.DATABASES["default"]["NAME"]
        with connection.cursor() as cursor:
            cursor.execute("DROP DATABASE %s" % dbname)
            cursor.execute("CREATE DATABASE %s" % dbname)

        base = str(settings.BASE_DIR)
        migrations = glob.glob(os.path.join(base, "*", "migrations"))

        for migration in migrations:
            shutil.rmtree(migration)

        apps = [migration.split("\\")[-2] for migration in migrations]
        for app in apps:
            os.system("python manage.py makemigrations %s" % app)
        os.system("python manage.py migrate")

now reset it using :

python manage.py resetdb

this will

• drop the database
• delete the migrations folders
• make migrations
• migrate the fresh db

This works for me

Step1:
delete all "migrations" folders in all apps

Step2:
create a brand new app.
python manage.py justTestApp.
Copy the new "migrations" folder of the new app to all apps

Step3:
delete the "db.sqlite3" file.
delete the "justTestApp" folder

Step4:
python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate

After you have resetted your unwanted migrations in your project, you can still have the issue of having these unwanted migrations in your test database (the one created by pytest).

You can reset the test database by adding the --create-db to your test command:

py.test path/to-tests.py --create-db

As mentioned by @brunofitas, going back to the previous migration helped my case. I thereafter deleted the migrations from that point to the last one, ran makemigrations, migrated and I was done.

If you want a completely clean start, you're gonna wanna drop the DB. Which means then to recreate it, add privileges, re-generate all the migrations, re-run them and create a superuser.

Good news is that you can easily make all this into a single/few line commands.

Fresh migration files

If you delete the whole folders, you're gonna have to run the makemigrations command mentioning all the app names. That's a hassle if you do this often. To have Django see the apps that need migrations, you'll wanna keep the migrations folder and the __init__.py inside them.

Here's a bash command for that:

find . -path "*migrations*" -not -regex ".*__init__.py" -a -not -regex ".*migrations" | xargs rm -rf

Then the usual (this should create migrations for all the apps that had migrations before):

python manage.py makemigrations

Resetting the DB

For SQLite just delete the DB file.

For PostgreSQL run this in the console:

psql -c "drop database <db_name>;"
psql -c "create database <db_name>;"
psql -c "grant all on database <db_name> to <db_user>;"

And then finally re-run migrations with

python manage.py migrate

Superuser

You're gonna obviously be missing a superuser, so you might wanna also do:

python manage.py createsuperuser

No-input way of doing that is piping python code into the shell:

echo "from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model; User = get_user_model(); User.objects.create_superuser('admin', '[email protected]', 'pa$$w0rd')" | python manage.py shell

---

Generally speaking about these very common actions - Do yourself a favour and write a bit of bash. It has saved me many, many accumulated hours over the years of working with not only Django. Because even better than a oneline command is having a whole utility file to store more of these handy functions. Then you can just run something like:

django --reset_migrations
db --reset <my_db>
django --migrate

Or even aggregate that into a single line if you find yourself repeating the same few actions. Add this to your bashprofile

reset_django() {
	find . -path "*migrations*" -not -regex ".*__init__.py" -a -not -regex ".*migrations" | xargs rm -rf
    python manage.py makemigrations
    psql -c "drop database <db_name>;"
    psql -c "create database <db_name>;"
    psql -c "grant all on database <db_name> to <db_user>;"
    python manage.py migrate
    echo "from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model; User = get_user_model(); User.objects.create_superuser('admin', '[email protected]', 'pa$$w0rd')" | python manage.py shell
}

---

My Django lite utilities for inspiration:

#!/bin/bash


django() {

	project_name=$(basename $PWD)
	project_path="$PWD"
	manage_path="${project_path}/${project_name}/manage.py"

	if [ ! -f $manage_path ] ; then  # No project/manage.py
		echo "Error: Could not locate Django manage.py file."
		return -1
	fi

	if [ $# -eq 0 ] ; then
		echo "Django project detected."
	fi

	while [ ! $# -eq 0 ]
		do
			case "$1" in

				--help | -h)
						echo "Django shortcut, unknown commands are forwarded to manage.py"
						echo "	-c, --check			Run Django manage.py check."
						echo "	--req			Install requirements."
						echo "	-r, --run			Run server."
						echo "	-s, --shell			Run Django shell plus."
						echo "	-sd, --shell			Run Django shell plus. Debug DB (print sql)"
						echo ""
					;;

				--check | -c)
						python $manage_path check
					;;

				--shell | -s)
						python $manage_path shell_plus --bpython
					;;

				--shell | -sd)
						python $manage_path shell_plus --bpython --print-sql
					;;

				--run | -r)
						python $manage_path runserver
					;;

				--req)
						pip install -r $project_path/requirements.txt
					;;

				--mig | -m)
						python $manage_path makemigrations
						python $manage_path migrate
					;;

				--reset_migrations)
						find . -path "*migrations*" -not -regex ".*__init__.py" -a -not -regex ".*migrations" | xargs rm -rf
						python $manage_path makemigrations
						;;

				*)
					python $manage_path "$@"
					;;

			esac
			shift
		done

}