Django 1.8 - what's the difference between migrate and makemigrations?

Question

According to the documentation here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/topics/migrations/ it says:

migrate, which is responsible for applying migrations, as          


        

Answer 1

As we know Django is an ORM (Object Relational Mapping). When we use the command:

python manage.py makemigrations [app_name]

It will generate the sql command to create the table corresponding to each class you made in models.py file. then the command:

python manage.py migrate [app_name]

will create the table in database using the commands which have been generated by makemigrations.

For example, if we make a model class-

from django.db import models

class Person(models.Model):
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)

The corresponding sql command after using makemigrations will be

CREATE TABLE myapp_person (
"id" serial NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
"first_name" varchar(30) NOT NULL,
"last_name" varchar(30) NOT NULL
);

and using above command, table will be created in the database when we use migrate.