Renaming an app with Django and South

Question

I am renaming an application to a more suitable name. In doing so, I want to ensure that South properly migrates the database (renames database tables and changes reference

Answer 1

Disclaimer: This answer is for those who do not care about migration history and have already messed up by renaming the app, completely forgetting about migrations (like I did). Worked for me.

After changing folder name, dealing with all imports in your code and changing corresponding app name in settings.INSTALLED_APPS, just delete all previous migrations folder. Then make an initial one like this

manage.py schemamigration new_app --initial

Then, when applying it, fake it like this

manage.py migrate new_app 0001 --fake

Do not forget to --fake it, otherwise you might end up losing data

All further migrations will work just fine

manage.py migrate new_app 0002

Also you can delete from south_migrationhistory where app_name = "old_app"