Django south migration with --noinput does not remove contenttypes when renaming tables

Question

I am using django-south for migrating database tables in a django project. And I am renaming a model as discussed in a previous question:

    # Renaming model from 'Foo' to 'Bar'                                                                                                                      
    db.rename_table('myapp_foo', 'myapp_bar')                                                                                                                        
    db.send_create_signal('myapp', ['Bar'])

However, I use fabric to automatically deploy my application to production servers, and I want the migrations to run without any user input. For this, I run the migration command with the noinput option as follows

python manage.py migrate --noinput

This works fine except that the send_create_signal does not remove stale contenttypes in this mode.

This is because the django contenttype managament command update_contenttypes only removes the stale contenttypes if input is given.

I could replicate the update_contenttypes command directly in the south migration, but that does not seem like a good solution. Does anyone have suggestions on how to trigger the removal of the contenttypes without repeating what is in the django command?

Answer 1

In my experience, running manage.py syncdb --all works some, but not all of the time when South is involved. You might try giving it a go, as it has worked for me in the past, certainly when removing stale models from the content-types table.