Django makemigrations wants to delete everything it just created

Question

I just followed this procedure:

• makemigrations (success)
• migrate (success)
• Copy the app on another server (with the migration files)
• Create a new empty database on that server
• migrate (success, it creates the correct schema)
• Fill the new database with data
• Just to test: migrate ....

At this point Django says I have "changes that are not yet reflected in a migration, and so won't be applied. Run 'manage.py makemigrations' to make new migrations, and then re-run 'manage.py migrate' to apply them"

But when I run makemigrations, it creates a new one that wants to "Remove field" every foreign key and "Delete model" all of my models. If I run it it empties my database. My models.py are intact.

What is happening ??

Answer 1

I had the same problem in my project. Running forward I can say that django removes models that has no import (making the Delete model migration). The documentation says that you should import your model in the myApp/models/__init__.py file (see https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/topics/db/models/#organizing-models-in-a-package).

In my case I imported the model somewhere to make manipulations but model had been removing elsewhere.

I had made a useless import in an admin.py file that has solved my situation (I didn't try to follow the documentation and import it in the __init__.py but sure it should help). I had not realized yet why does it work that way (hope that someone could note this moment) and also hope this solution will help you.