Adding a field to an existing Django model

Django Models

Django Models Problem Overview


I have a little website with a few users and I'd like to add a field to one of my models (and hence tables.) The problem is that syncdb of course won't touch the existing models and I'm trying to figure out how to add this field to the model/table without having to repopulate the entire thing.

Example:

class Newspaper(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField()

class UserProfile(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(user, unique=True)
    reads = models.ManyToManyField(Newspaper)

Now I'd like to add a URL field (blank=True) to the Newspaper model without breaking the user profiles.

Any ideas?

Django Models Solutions


Solution 1 - Django Models

There's no built-in way to do this. However there are a number of third-party projects that will do it for you. The two leading ones are called South and django-evolution, although there are various others as well (including one I've been involved with, dmigrations).

I would definitely recommend South - it has a number of really neat features and works really well.

Solution 2 - Django Models

You could try getting the SQL for your new field using:

manage.py sql appname

Where appname is the name of the application in which your newspaper class lives.

Then, you could manually add a field to your appname_newspaper table, using ALTER TABLE. I'm not aware of a way to do this directly with Django, since Django does not support migrations.

Solution 3 - Django Models

2015 answer:

Run the following:

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate

Attributions

All content for this solution is sourced from the original question on Stackoverflow.

The content on this page is licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.

Content TypeOriginal AuthorOriginal Content on Stackoverflow
QuestionDeniz DoganView Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Django ModelsDaniel RosemanView Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Django ModelsDominic RodgerView Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 3 - Django ModelsUserView Answer on Stackoverflow