This document explains how to structure and write database migrations for different scenarios you might encounter. For introductory material on migrations, see the topic guide.
When using multiple databases, you may need to figure out whether or not to run a migration against a particular database. For example, you may want to only run a migration on a particular database.
In order to do that you can check the database connection’s alias inside a
RunPython
operation by looking at the schema_editor.connection.alias
attribute:
from django.db import migrations
def forwards(apps, schema_editor):
if not schema_editor.connection.alias == 'default':
return
# Your migration code goes here
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
dependencies = [
# Dependencies to other migrations
]
operations = [
migrations.RunPython(forwards),
]
You can also provide hints that will be passed to the allow_migrate()
method of database routers as **hints
:
class MyRouter(object):
def allow_migrate(self, db, app_label, model_name=None, **hints):
if 'target_db' in hints:
return db == hints['target_db']
return True
Then, to leverage this in your migrations, do the following:
from django.db import migrations
def forwards(apps, schema_editor):
# Your migration code goes here
...
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
dependencies = [
# Dependencies to other migrations
]
operations = [
migrations.RunPython(forwards, hints={'target_db': 'default'}),
]
If your RunPython
or RunSQL
operation only affects one model, it’s good
practice to pass model_name
as a hint to make it as transparent as possible
to the router. This is especially important for reusable and third-party apps.
Applying a “plain” migration that adds a unique non-nullable field to a table with existing rows will raise an error because the value used to populate existing rows is generated only once, thus breaking the unique constraint.
Therefore, the following steps should be taken. In this example, we’ll add a
non-nullable UUIDField
with a default value. Modify
the respective field according to your needs.
Add the field on your model with default=uuid.uuid4
and unique=True
arguments (choose an appropriate default for the type of the field you’re
adding).
Run the makemigrations
command. This should generate a migration
with an AddField
operation.
Generate two empty migration files for the same app by running
makemigrations myapp --empty
twice. We’ve renamed the migration files to
give them meaningful names in the examples below.
Copy the AddField
operation from the auto-generated migration (the first
of the three new files) to the last migration and change AddField
to
AlterField
. For example:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# Generated by Django A.B on YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM
from __future__ import unicode_literals
from django.db import migrations, models
import uuid
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
dependencies = [
('myapp', '0005_populate_uuid_values'),
]
operations = [
migrations.AlterField(
model_name='mymodel',
name='uuid',
field=models.UUIDField(default=uuid.uuid4, unique=True),
),
]
Edit the first migration file. The generated migration class should look similar to this:
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
dependencies = [
('myapp', '0003_auto_20150129_1705'),
]
operations = [
migrations.AddField(
model_name='mymodel',
name='uuid',
field=models.UUIDField(default=uuid.uuid4, unique=True),
),
]
Change unique=True
to null=True
– this will create the intermediary
null field and defer creating the unique constraint until we’ve populated
unique values on all the rows.
In the first empty migration file, add a
RunPython
or
RunSQL
operation to generate a
unique value (UUID in the example) for each existing row. For example:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# Generated by Django A.B on YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM
from __future__ import unicode_literals
from django.db import migrations, models
import uuid
def gen_uuid(apps, schema_editor):
MyModel = apps.get_model('myapp', 'MyModel')
for row in MyModel.objects.all():
row.uuid = uuid.uuid4()
row.save()
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
dependencies = [
('myapp', '0004_add_uuid_field'),
]
operations = [
# omit reverse_code=... if you don't want the migration to be reversible.
migrations.RunPython(gen_uuid, reverse_code=migrations.RunPython.noop),
]
Now you can apply the migrations as usual with the migrate
command.
Note there is a race condition if you allow objects to be created while this
migration is running. Objects created after the AddField
and before
RunPython
will have their original uuid
’s overwritten.
On databases that support DDL transactions (SQLite and PostgreSQL), migrations
will run inside a transaction by default. For use cases such as performing data
migrations on large tables, you may want to prevent a migration from running in
a transaction by setting the atomic
attribute to False
:
from django.db import migrations
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
atomic = False
Within such a migration, all operations are run without a transaction. It’s
possible to execute parts of the migration inside a transaction using
atomic()
or by passing atomic=True
to
RunPython
.
Here’s an example of a non-atomic data migration that updates a large table in smaller batches:
import uuid
from django.db import migrations, transaction
def gen_uuid(apps, schema_editor):
MyModel = apps.get_model('myapp', 'MyModel')
while MyModel.objects.filter(uuid__isnull=True).exists():
with transaction.atomic():
for row in MyModel.objects.filter(uuid__isnull=True)[:1000]:
row.uuid = uuid.uuid4()
row.save()
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
atomic = False
operations = [
migrations.RunPython(gen_uuid),
]
The atomic
attribute doesn’t have an effect on databases that don’t support
DDL transactions (e.g. MySQL, Oracle).
Django determines the order in which migrations should be applied not by the
filename of each migration, but by building a graph using two properties on the
Migration
class: dependencies
and run_before
.
If you’ve used the makemigrations
command you’ve probably
already seen dependencies
in action because auto-created
migrations have this defined as part of their creation process.
The dependencies
property is declared like this:
from django.db import migrations
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
dependencies = [
('myapp', '0123_the_previous_migration'),
]
Usually this will be enough, but from time to time you may need to
ensure that your migration runs before other migrations. This is
useful, for example, to make third-party apps’ migrations run after
your AUTH_USER_MODEL
replacement.
To achieve this, place all migrations that should depend on yours in
the run_before
attribute on your Migration
class:
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
...
run_before = [
('third_party_app', '0001_do_awesome'),
]
Prefer using dependencies
over run_before
when possible. You should
only use run_before
if it is undesirable or impractical to specify
dependencies
in the migration which you want to run after the one you are
writing.
You can use a data migration to move data from one third-party application to another.
If you plan to remove the old app later, you’ll need to set the dependencies
property based on whether or not the old app is installed. Otherwise, you’ll
have missing dependencies once you uninstall the old app. Similarly, you’ll
need to catch LookupError
in the apps.get_model()
call that
retrieves models from the old app. This approach allows you to deploy your
project anywhere without first installing and then uninstalling the old app.
Here’s a sample migration:
from django.apps import apps as global_apps
from django.db import migrations
def forwards(apps, schema_editor):
try:
OldModel = apps.get_model('old_app', 'OldModel')
except LookupError:
# The old app isn't installed.
return
NewModel = apps.get_model('new_app', 'NewModel')
NewModel.objects.bulk_create(
NewModel(new_attribute=old_object.old_attribute)
for old_object in OldModel.objects.all()
)
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
operations = [
migrations.RunPython(forwards, migrations.RunPython.noop),
]
dependencies = [
('myapp', '0123_the_previous_migration'),
('new_app', '0001_initial'),
]
if global_apps.is_installed('old_app'):
dependencies.append(('old_app', '0001_initial'))
Also consider what you want to happen when the migration is unapplied. You
could either do nothing (as in the example above) or remove some or all of the
data from the new application. Adjust the second argument of the
RunPython
operation accordingly.
If you want to change an unmanaged model (managed=False
) to managed, you must remove
managed=False
and generate a migration before making other schema-related
changes to the model, since schema changes that appear in the migration that
contains the operation to change Meta.managed
may not be applied.
Jun 09, 2017