'Table doesn't exist' on django makemigrations

Question

On a django 1.11 application which uses mysql , I have 3 apps and in one of them I have a 'Country' model:

class Country(models.Model):
    countryId = models.AutoField(primary_key=True, db_column='country_id')
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    code = models.CharField(max_length=3)

    class Meta:
        db_table = 'country'

Whaen I try to makemigrations I get this error:

django.db.utils.ProgrammingError: (1146, "Table 'dbname.country' doesn't exist")

If I run making migration for another app which is not related to this model and its database table using ./manage.py makemigrations another_app, I still get this error.

Answer 1

I've had this problem and it's because I was initializing a default value somewhere in a model using... the database that I had just dropped. In a nutshell I had something like forms.ChoiceField(choices=get_some_data(),...) where get_some_data() used the database to retrieve some default values.

I wish you had posted the backtrace because in my case it's pretty obvious by looking at the backtrace that get_some_data() was using the orm (using something like somemodel.objetcs.filter(...)).

Answer 2

Somehow, Django thinks you've already created this table and are now trying to modify it, while in fact you've externally dropped the table and started over. If that's the case, delete all of the files in migrations folders belong to your apps and start over with ./manage.py makemigrations.