Migrating existing auth.User data to new Django 1.5 custom user model?

Question

I\'d prefer not to destroy all the users on my site. But I want to take advantage of Django 1.5\'s custom pluggable user model. Here\'s my new user model:

Answer 1

I think you've correctly identified that a migration framework like South is the right way to go here. Assuming you're using South, you should be able to use the Data Migrations functionality to port the old users to your new model.

Specifically, I would add a forwards method to copy all rows in your user table to the new table. Something along the lines of:

def forwards(self, orm):
    for user in orm.User.objects.all():
        new_user = SiteUser()
        new_user.save()

You could also use the bulk_create method to speed things up.