Django 1.8 migrations “Table already exists”

Question

I've been working on making an auto-deployment system to make updating my django site easier, and it mostly works, but right now my database changes are screwy. I have the auto deployment run "makemigrations" "migrate" then "syncdb"

The trouble I have is when I run migrate, it tells me that my table already exists and can't be created. Previous answers have said to run "migrate --fake", but if I do this, it appears to think everything is up to date. The issue then is that I run "makemigrations" or "migrate" and it says no changes detected (even though there is a missing column from my database). I tried to run "sqlall" to figure out what it thinks the database should be, and it tells me that I have pending migrations. So I tried running "migrate" and it said no migrations exist.

How do I manage this? And in the future, what should I do for database migrations to troubleshoot/fix these problems?

Thanks

Answer 1

I fixed the problem. The issue stemmed from a misunderstanding of how Django migrations worked. Also, as per the comments, syncdb is no longer a command in manage.py.

The original issue was that I had been using a different database for deployment and then I switched and my migrations were out of sync from my development database, so I had to clear out both databases and migrations and start over with my data. Then I run makemigrations on my local machine and migrate there (for my dev DB). Then I upload to the server and have the fab script run migrate on the server production DB without calling makemigrations . This seems to have fixed the issue.