auth_user error with Django 1.8 and syncdb / migrate

Question

When upgrading to Django 1.8 (with zc.buildout) and running syncdb or migrate, I get this message:

django.db.utils.ProgrammingError: relation \"auth_user\" does no

Answer 1

To fix this problem here is what I did:

1) Find all foreign key relation fields like OneToOneField, ForeignKey and ManyToManyFields in your project, including any reusable apps that are referring to auth.User or import User and set it to settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL as above. At minimum use:

'auth.User'

2) For all the models that have the above, make sure the models have a valid django migration (not south). If they have south migrations, rename the directory to migrations_south and then run the makemigrations command for that app:

./manage.py makemigrations affected_app

Sometimes there is a django migrations folder under a different name, not the default migrations directory. In such cases, reference this via MIGRATION_MODULES in your settings.py:

MIGRATION_MODULES = {'filer': 'filer.migrations_django'}

Since the issue was hard to find on larger projects, I commented out all custom apps in INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py and ran the test command, since it will run migrate and try to re-create the database for you:

./manage.py test

Looks like that fixed it for me. I'm not sure if step 1 is mandatory or just best practice. But you definitely need to convert the apps to migrations.

Cheers!

PS. Be ready for what's coming in Django 1.9. The syncdb command will be removed. The legacy method of syncing apps without migrations is removed, and migrations are compulsory for all apps.