Django’s makemigrations and migrate commands are very useful to update existing database tables to reflect model changes.
However if you have made many existing table column name changes, migrate will ask you a series of ‘y/N’ questions about which column names are changed. This can be tedious to cycle through especially if there are many changes.
Depending on the relationships your table has, it may be easier and quicker to:
- Create a backup of the table by copying and renaming table or exporting table data to csv
- Drop the table
- Recreate table from scratch
- Reload data into the new updated table
The question is how to recreate the table?
After you drop the table you can remove your table model from the models.py field and then run makemigrations and then run migrate —fake which is the special trick to get past migrate wanting your table to exist before it can delete it.
Then after you run migrate –fake, you can put your update model for your table back into your models.py and then makemigrations and migrate and you will get your new updated table recreated in database.
Then you can recover your data from the backup with SQL INSERT or by using database data import feature.