According to the articles I have read the correct way to enable core data light weight migrations is by passing options to addPersistentStoreWithType:
addPersistentStoreWithType
Note that both NSPersistentStore's shouldInferMappingModelAutomatically and shouldMigrateStoreAutomatically are true by default.
NSPersistentStore
shouldInferMappingModelAutomatically
shouldMigrateStoreAutomatically
true
Apple reference for: