Django migration strategy for renaming a model and relationship fields

Question

I\'m planning to rename several models in an existing Django project where there are many other models that have foreign key relationships to the models I would like to rena

Answer 1

I also faced the problem as v.thorey described and found that his approach is very useful but can be condensed into fewer steps which are actually step 5 to 8 as Fiver described without step 1 to 4 except that step 7 needs to be changed as my below step 3. The overall steps are as follow:

Step 1: Edit the related field names in models.py

class Bar(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(unique=True, max_length=32)
    description = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)


class AnotherModel(models.Model):
    bar = models.ForeignKey(Bar)  # <-- changed field name
    is_awesome = models.BooleanField()


class YetAnotherModel(models.Model):
    bar = models.ForeignKey(Bar)  # <-- changed field name
    is_ridonkulous = models.BooleanField()

Step 2: Create an empty migration

python manage.py makemigrations --empty myapp

Step 3: Edit the Migration class in the migration file created in Step 2

class Migration(migrations.Migration):

dependencies = [
    ('myapp', '0001_initial'), 
]

operations = [
    migrations.AlterField(
        model_name='AnotherModel',
        name='foo',
        field=models.IntegerField(),
    ),
    migrations.AlterField(
        model_name='YetAnotherModel',
        name='foo',
        field=models.IntegerField(),
    ),
    migrations.RenameModel('Foo', 'Bar'),
    migrations.AlterField(
        model_name='AnotherModel',
        name='foo',
        field=models.ForeignKey(to='myapp.Bar'),
    ),
    migrations.AlterField(
        model_name='YetAnotherModel',
        name='foo',
        field=models.ForeignKey(to='myapp.Bar'),
    ),
    migrations.RenameField('AnotherModel', 'foo', 'bar'),
    migrations.RenameField('YetAnotherModel', 'foo', 'bar')
]

Step 4: Apply the migration

python manage.py migrate

Done

P.S. I've tried this approach on Django 1.9