SyncDB after installing new app having already installed South - don't want to mess anything up

Question

I'm using South to manage my (MySQL) database tables for a Django 1.4 project, its working great.

This is a bit of a newbie question, but I'm now adding sorl.thumbnail (http://sorl-thumbnail.readthedocs.org/en/latest/installation.html#installation) to the list of installed apps in the settings file.

The instructions say that I now have to use syncdb if I'm using a "cached database key value store".

Is it OK to go ahead and use syncdb? I'm not quite sure if my MySQL+South installation counts as one. Will this mess anything up?

Answer 1

If i'm not wrong, when you start using south you should never use syncdb again. Instead, you should use schemamigration or other south's specific commands.

Here you can find what you were looking for. I quote here the phrase that should clear your mind:

The main use of schemamigration is when you’ve just finished your shiny new models.py and want to load up your database. In vanilla Django, you’d just run syncdb - however, with migrations, you’ll need a migration to create the tables.

In this scenario, you just run:

./manage.py schemamigration myapp --initial

That will write one big migration to create all the tables for the models in your app; just run ./manage.py migrate to get it in and you’re done in only one more step than syncdb!

Hope it helps!