What's the recommended approach to resetting migration history using Django South?

Question

I've accumulated quite a few migrations using South (0.7) and Django (1.1.2) which are starting to consume quite a bit of time in my unit tests. I would like to reset the baseline and start a fresh set of migrations. I've reviewed the South documentation, done the usual Google/Stackoverflow searching (e.g. "django south (reset OR delete OR remove) migration history") and haven't found anything obvious.

One approach I've contemplated would involve "starting over" by "removing" South or "clearing" the history manually (e.g. clear the db table, remove migration files from the migrations director) and just re-run,

./manage.py schemamigration southtut --initial

So, if anyone has done this before and has some tips/suggestions they would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

If you need to selectively (for just one app) reset migrations that are taking too long, this worked for me.

rm <app-dir>/migrations/*
python manage.py schemamigration <app-name> --initial
python manage.py migrate <app-name> 0001 --fake  --delete-ghost-migrations

Don't forget to manually restore any dependencies on other apps by adding lines like depends_on = (("<other_app_name>", "0001_initial"),("<yet_another_app_name>", "0001_initial")) to your <app-dir>/migrations/0001_initial.py file, as the first attribute in your migration class just below class Migration(SchemaMigration):.

You can then ./manage.py migrate <app-name> --fake --delete-ghost-migrations on other environments, per this SO answer. Of course if you fake the delete or fake the migrate zero you'll need to manually delete any left-over db tables with a migration like this.

A more nuclear option is to ./manage.py migrate --fake --delete-ghost-migrations on the live deployment server followed by a [my]sqldump. Then pipe that dump into [my]sql on the environments where you need the migrated, fully-populated db. South sacrilege, I know, but worked for me.