auth_user error with Django 1.8 and syncdb / migrate

When upgrading to Django 1.8 (with zc.buildout) and running syncdb or migrate, I get this message:

django.db.utils.ProgrammingError: relation "auth_user" does not exist

One of my models contains django.contrib.auth.models.User:

user = models.ForeignKey(
    User, related_name='%(app_label)s_%(class)s_user',
    blank=True, null=True, editable=False
)

Downgrading to Django 1.7 removes the error. Do I have to include the User object differently in Django 1.8?

Solution 1:

I fix this by running auth first, then the rest of my migrations:

python manage.py migrate auth
python manage.py migrate

Solution 2:

On my environment, I fix this running makemigrations on all apps that have relationship with django.contrib.auth.models:

manage.py makemigrations app_with_user_relation
manage.py migrate

Solution 3:

If you are using heroku like I was run

heroku run python manage.py makemigrations

This will likely give you a message saying there are now changes. Ignore that then run

heroku run python manage.py migrate

this will give you some output suggesting something has been done. Finally run

heroku run python manage.py createsuperuser

Solution 4:

This problem is contained by running "makemigrations" for all apps, that have not yet been migrated, i.e. apps that do not yet have an "initial_0001.py" file in their migrations directory.

This is done (in our case we use a makefile) by running for each of these apps:

manage.py makemigrations app_name

Once that is done, you can execute:

manage.py migrate

as usual.

The underlying cause for this is that for some reason

manage.py makemigrations

does not always create these initial migrations if they are not already there. And that leads to the mentioned error.

On the contrary,

manage.py makemigrations app_name

does always create them (if not already there). Unfortunately I cannot fathom the reasons for this asymmetry.

Solution 5:

To fix this problem here is what I did:

1) Find all foreign key relation fields like OneToOneField, ForeignKey and ManyToManyFields in your project, including any reusable apps that are referring to auth.User or import User and set it to settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL as above. At minimum use:

'auth.User'

2) For all the models that have the above, make sure the models have a valid django migration (not south). If they have south migrations, rename the directory to migrations_south and then run the makemigrations command for that app:

./manage.py makemigrations affected_app

Sometimes there is a django migrations folder under a different name, not the default migrations directory. In such cases, reference this via MIGRATION_MODULES in your settings.py:

MIGRATION_MODULES = {'filer': 'filer.migrations_django'}

Since the issue was hard to find on larger projects, I commented out all custom apps in INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py and ran the test command, since it will run migrate and try to re-create the database for you:

./manage.py test

Looks like that fixed it for me. I'm not sure if step 1 is mandatory or just best practice. But you definitely need to convert the apps to migrations.

Cheers!

PS. Be ready for what's coming in Django 1.9. The syncdb command will be removed. The legacy method of syncing apps without migrations is removed, and migrations are compulsory for all apps.