Django: Error: Unknown command: 'makemigrations'

Question

I am trying to follow the Django tutorial and I faced the following error when I enter python manage.py makemigrations polls

Unknown command: 'makemigrations'

Here's the link to the tutorial and I accomplished all the previous steps successfully and I am not sure what's going wrong now or how to fix it. P.S.: I have already included "polls" in the INSTALLED_APPS!

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'polls',
    'South',
)

Answer: I had to modify INSTALLED_APPS to :

INSTALLED_APPS = (
        'django.contrib.admin',
        'django.contrib.auth',
        'django.contrib.contenttypes',
        'django.contrib.sessions',
        'django.contrib.messages',
        'django.contrib.staticfiles',
        'polls',
    )

and also used this command: python manage.py syncdb

Answer 1

Migrations were first added in version 1.7, officially released on September 2, 2014. You need to make sure your tutorial matches the version of Django you're working with. For instance, this version of the tutorial covers 1.9:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/intro/tutorial01/

Or, if you're using an older version of Django, you can change the "1.9" in that URL to whatever version you're on (back to 1.3). Or use the dropdown on the docs page to pick the version and search for "tutorial".

Answer 2

Find out what version of django you're running (thanks @BradyEmerson):

python -c "import django; print(django.get_version())"

If older than 1.8:

pip install --upgrade django

Answer 3

I was using version 1.9 and still getting this error. I had unapplied migrations and that was the root cause in my case. I ran 'python manage.py migrate' to apply them and it worked for me.