Making Django App Reset South-Aware

01 Nov 2012

Today I needed to reset an app in a Django site I’m working on. The problem is that I’m using South on this app to track database schema migrations. Since I’m using South, I can’t just do:

python manage.py reset myapp

because that doesn’t reset the South migration history. One solution I found floating around on the web got me pretty close, but it also coalesced all of my existing migrations into a single “initial” migration, which I didn’t want.

All I need to do to accomplish what I want (reset an app while maintaining existing migrations) is:

python manage.py sqlclear myapp | python manage.py dbshell
# ...edit south.models.MigrationHistory...
python manage.py migrate myapp

The Management Command

To make things a little easier, I’ve packaged the first two steps up into a Django management command so that I can reset a South app like so:

python manage.py south_clear myapp
python manage.py migrate myapp

Here’s the management command:

Drop this in a management/commands directory (if you’ve never done that before, see here) and you’re good to go!

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