Django South - Creating initial migration for an app that has already populated tables

Scenario: I have an app in my Django application that I have never put under South management. I ran a syncdb a long time ago, and the models of this app have never had to change. Throughout time, I have obviously added data to those tables.

Now, I wish to put this app under south management, but once the tables already exist, I can create the migration file, but naturally, I cant execute them. I get a database error for existing tables:

django.db.utils.DatabaseError: (1050, "Table 'ooyala_ooyalaitem' already exists")

This is pretty obvious for me. What I was wondering is if there is a smart way to run the migrate command to use the current tables. I did not want to dump the data, delete tables manually, run the migration and repopulate things, and neither I wanted to create a data migration for this.

Any ideas on this? Is it even possible?

Thanks for your time.

Solution

This is covered in the manual.

Converting an app to use South is very easy:

Edit your settings.py and put ‘south’ into INSTALLED_APPS (assuming you’ve installed it to the right place)

Run ./manage.py syncdb to load the South table into the database. Note that syncdb looks different now - South modifies it.

Run ./manage.py convert_to_south myapp - South will automatically make and pretend to apply your first migration.

Note that you’ll need to convert before you make any changes; South detects changes by comparing against the frozen state of the last migration, so it cannot detect changes from before you converted to using South.