Is it safe to rename Django migrations file?

django django-migrations
geckon picture geckon · May 24, 2015 · Viewed 8.3k times · Source

Since Django 1.8 the makemigrations command has a --name, -n option to specify custom name for the created migrations file.

I'd like to know whether it's safe in older versions of Django to create the migrations file with the automatically generated name and then rename the file manually. It seems to work as expected. Are there any potential risks?

Answer

knbk picture knbk · May 24, 2015

This works, with a minor caveat: Django will no longer know that the renamed migration is applied.

So the steps to renaming a migration are:

  1. Rename the file.
  2. Repoint any dependencies to the new file.
  3. If the renamed migration was already applied, apply it again using --fake.

If it's a brand new migration, 2 and 3 won't apply, and it's perfectly fine to rename them.

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