Add a management command to drop all tables

[Mattia Procopio]

Sometimes it happeens that I need to delete all tables within my database, dropping tables manually is a boring procedure. Would it be good to add such a feature as command?

[Yamila]

Talked to the author of the ticket. Add clarifying comment:

The main concern is that in the same database you may have tables belonging and non-belonging the django project. In that scenario:

• dropdb : would cause losing all tables even those I would like to keep
• entering the db-shell and deleting tables one by one is boring and it's easy to make a mistake

[Tim Graham]

For apps without migrations, you could something like: ./manage.py sqlclear | ./manage.py dbshell I think. Apps with migrations only support sqlmigrate and sqlflush though. I am not sure if there is a good reason not to support sqlclear so this is still possible.

[Andrew Godwin]

With migrations you can just reverse the migrations with ./manage.py migrate appname zero, which will clear everything as required.

[Burhan Khalid]

Faced with a similar problem, I came up with this snippet that will clear only those apps that are not django.contrib. (of course, this is before migrations came around). Might give some ideas:

echo 'from django.conf import settings; print settings.INSTALLED_APPS; quit();' | \
python manage.py shell --plain 2>&1 | \
tail -n1 | sed -r "s|^.*\((.*)\).*$|\1|; s|[',]| |g; s|django\.contrib\.||g" | \
xargs python manage.py sqlclear | \
python manage.py dbshell && python manage.py syncdb

[Shai Berger]

@MattBlack85: You said in the ticket that "this is easy using SQLite", but I don't see how that fits with the clarification in comment:1. Do you care to elaborate?

[Mattia Procopio]

sure, I didn't explain well, I'm goin to update the description. I was meaning "with SQLite usually the db can be easily dropped with a rm and recreated" but yeah, that's not dropping table

[Shai Berger]

I guess I didn't explain my question clearly enough:

"drop database" on other backends is just as easy as "rm" with SQLite, but that does not seem satisfactory to you. According to comment:1, your intention is to drop the Django-managed tables only, but apparently that does not apply for SQLite because there, dropping everything is allowed.

So -- is the comparison to SQLite at all relevant? The feature request is valid without it, and less clear with it.

[Mattia Procopio]

I'd like to manage drop table for SQLite too. I'll drop the reference to SQLite at all to make this more clear.

[Tim Graham]

Closing per comment 6, "With migrations you can just reverse the migrations with ./manage.py migrate appname zero, which will clear everything as required."

[thenewguy]

I tried this but it doesn't work with non-reversable migrations... raise Migration.IrreversibleError("Operation %s in %s is not reversible" % (operation, self))

It would be handy to be able to clear a database even when the migrations cannot be reversed

[Tim Graham]

I personally don't think this is a common enough case that we need to add something to core. Feel free to raise it on the DevelopersMailingList for further discussion. Obviously if it cannot be done as a third-party command for some reasons, there might be a stronger justification for making some change in core to ease that.

[thenewguy]

Adjust reason for closing per https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/23833#comment:16