How to move a model between two Django apps (Django 1.7)

Question

So about a year ago I started a project and like all new developers I didn\'t really focus too much on the structure, however now I am further along with Django it has start

Answer 1

Lets say you are moving model TheModel from app_a to app_b.

An alternate solution is to alter the existing migrations by hand. The idea is that each time you see an operation altering TheModel in app_a's migrations, you copy that operation to the end of app_b's initial migration. And each time you see a reference 'app_a.TheModel' in app_a's migrations, you change it to 'app_b.TheModel'.

I just did this for an existing project, where I wanted to extract a certain model to an reusable app. The procedure went smoothly. I guess things would be much harder if there were references from app_b to app_a. Also, I had a manually defined Meta.db_table for my model which might have helped.

Notably you will end up with altered migration history. This doesn't matter, even if you have a database with the original migrations applied. If both the original and the rewritten migrations end up with the same database schema, then such rewrite should be OK.