Django 1.8 - what's the difference between migrate and makemigrations?

Question

According to the documentation here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/topics/migrations/ it says:

migrate, which is responsible for applying migrations, as well as unapplying and listing their status. 

and

makemigrations, which is responsible for creating new migrations based on the changes you have made to your models. 

From what I understand, I first do

makemigrations 

to create the migration file and then do

migrate 

to actually apply the migration?

Do note though that I just began my Django project and I added my app to my "installed_apps" list. After that, I did

python manage.py runserver 

and it said

You have unapplied migrations; your app may not work properly until they are applied. Run 'python manage.py migrate' to apply them. 

It didn't mention anything about running makemigrations.

Answer 1

According the Polls tutorial:

1. python manage.py makemigrations <app>: Create the migrations (generate the SQL commands).

2. python manage.py migrate: Run the migrations (execute the SQL commands).

Answer 2

As Django's documentation says Migrations are Django’s way of propagating changes you make to your models (adding a field, deleting a model, etc.) into your database schema.

makemigrations basically generates the SQL commands for preinstalled apps (which can be viewed in installed apps in settings.py) and your newly created apps' model which you add in installed apps.It does not execute those commands in your database file. So tables doesn't created after makemigrations.

After applying makemigrations you can see those SQL commands with sqlmigrate which shows all the SQL commands which has been generated by makemigrations.

migrate executes those SQL commands in database file.So after executing migrate all the tables of your installed apps are created in your database file.

You can conform this by installing sqlite browser and opening db.sqlite3 you can see all the tables appears in the database file after executing migrate command.