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 references in django_content_type or south_migrationhistory). I know how to migrate a model to a different app, but when I try rename the app itself, South does not recognize the migration history properly.

Undesirable solution: In renaming old_app to new_app I could leave old_app/migrations intact and add new migrations to this directory to migrate the database to reference new_app.

If possible I would prefer to delete the directory old_app entirely. I have not yet thought of a better solution to this problem.

What is the best way to rename an app with Django South without losing data?

Answer 1

I agree with Laksham that you should avoid this situation. But sometimes, we have to. I've faced this situation in the past and I've managed it this way.

If you want to avoid losing data you can dump the old application data into a json file.

python manage.py dumpdata old_app --natural --indent=4 1> old_app.json

Note the --natural option that will force the content types to be exported with their natural keys (app_name, model)

Then you can create a small command to open this json file and to replace all the old_app references with the new_app.

Something like this should work

class Command(BaseCommand):
    help = u"Rename app in json dump"

    def handle(self, *args, **options):
        try:
            old_app = args[0]
            new_app = args[1]
            filename = args[2]
        except IndexError:
            print u'usage :', __name__.split('.')[-1], 'old_app new_app dumpfile.json'
            return

        try:
            dump_file = open(filename, 'r')
        except IOError:
            print filename, u"doesn't exist"
            return

        objects = json.loads(dump_file.read())
        dump_file.close()

        for obj in objects:
            obj["model"] = obj["model"].replace(old_app, new_app, 1)

            if obj["fields"].has_key("content_type") and (old_app == obj["fields"]["content_type"][0]):
                obj["fields"]["content_type"][0] = new_app

        dump_file = open(filename, 'w')
        dump_file.write(json.dumps(objects, indent=4))
        dump_file.close()

Then rename the application, change the name in INSTALLED_APPS.

Then, you should remove all south migrations, regenerate and apply an initial migration for the new app. Then run the SQL command:

update django_content_type set app_label='new_app' where app_label='old_app'

Then launch a south migrate for the new app in order to create the tables and load the json file.

python manage.py loaddata old_app.json

I've done something similar on a project and it seems to work ok.

I hope it helps