Django - makemigrations - No changes detected

Question

To create initial migrations for an app, run makemigrations and specify the app name. The migrations folder will be created.

./manage.py makemigrations <myapp>

Your app must be included in INSTALLED_APPS first (inside settings.py).

My problem (and so solution) was yet different from those described above.

I wasn't using models.py file, but created a models directory and created the my_model.py file there, where I put my model. Django couldn't find my model so it wrote that there are no migrations to apply.

My solution was: in the my_app/models/__init__.py file I added this line: from .my_model import MyModel

There are multiple possible reasons for django not detecting what to migrate during the makemigrations command.

1. migration folder You need a migrations package in your app.
2. INSTALLED_APPS You need your app to be specified in the INSTALLED_APPS .dict
3. Verbosity start by running makemigrations -v 3 for verbosity. This might shed some light on the problem.
4. Full path In INSTALLED_APPS it is recommended to specify the full module app config path 'apply.apps.MyAppConfig'
5. --settings you might want to make sure the correct settings file is set: manage.py makemigrations --settings mysite.settings
6. specify app name explicitly put the app name in manage.py makemigrations myapp - that narrows down the migrations for the app alone and helps you isolate the problem.

7. model meta check you have the right app_label in your model meta

8. Debug django debug django core script. makemigrations command is pretty much straight forward. Here's how to do it in pycharm. change your script definition accordingly (ex: makemigrations --traceback myapp)

Multiple databases:

• Db Router when working with django db router, the router class (your custom router class) needs to implement the allow_syncdb method.

makemigrations always creates migrations for model changes, but if allow_migrate() returns False,

I've read many answers to this question often stating to simply run makemigrations in some other ways. But to me, the problem was in the Meta subclass of models.

I have an app config that says label = <app name> (in the apps.py file, beside models.py, views.py etc). If by any chance your meta class doesn't have the same label as the app label (for instance because you are splitting one too big app into multiple ones), no changes are detected (and no helpful error message whatsoever). So in my model class I have now:

class ModelClassName(models.Model):

    class Meta:
        app_label = '<app name>' # <-- this label was wrong before.

    field_name = models.FloatField()
    ...

Running Django 1.10 here.

It is a comment but should probably be an answer.

Make sure that your app name is in settings.py INSTALLED_APPS otherwise no matter what you do it will not run the migrations.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',

    'blog',
]

Then run:

./manage.py makemigrations blog

I had another problem not described here, which drove me nuts.

class MyModel(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=64, null=True)  # works
    language_code = models.CharField(max_length=2, default='en')  # works
    is_dumb = models.BooleanField(default=False),  # doesn't work

I had a trailing ',' in one line perhaps from copy&paste. The line with is_dumb doesn't created a model migration with './manage.py makemigrations' but also didn't throw an error. After removing the ',' it worked as expected.

So be careful when you do copy&paste :-)

There are sometimes when ./manage.py makemigrations is superior to ./manage.py makemigrations <myapp> because it can handle certain conflicts between apps.

Those occasions occur silently and it takes several hours of swearing to understand the real meaning of the dreaded No changes detected message.

Therefore, it is a far better choice to make use of the following command:

./manage.py makemigrations <myapp1> <myapp2> ... <myappN>