Django1.8 migrations, custom user model, in non-SQLite databases

[Vaibhav Mallya]

I've outlined the details here:
​http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31844053/bizarre-issues-with-django-1-8-migrations-custom-user-model-and-postgres-mysql

Basically - developing with SQLite3 worked perfectly fine with my custom user model class Client(AbstractBaseUser, PermissionsMixin and custom User Manager class UserManager(BaseUserManager):

When time came to get to production and use postgres or mysql, things started failing. The root of it is that the migrations aren't being run in the right order, and there are foreign key relations that aren't maintained.

What's odd is that running ./manage.py migrate twice in a row seems to work. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to help with tests. In no particular order, I would love some advice on:

1) How to unblock myself such that stuff 'just works' (my nuclear option is removing the custom user model and custom user manager, and migrating the old data over, which will take some time)

2) Understanding why everything seemed to work fine with SQLite, and why it fails with postgres/mysql

The solution of running ./manage.py makemigrations offerdrive' listed here doesn't help unfortunately...:
https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/24524

[Tim Graham]

Is this sentence from the 1.8 release notes applicable?

An app without migrations with a ForeignKey to an app with migrations may now result in a foreign key constraint error when migrating the database or running tests. In Django 1.7, this could fail silently and result in a missing constraint. To resolve the error, add migrations to the app without them.

If not, we'll need a sample project that we can use to reproduce and debug the issue.

[Vaibhav Mallya]

Update - Did some more digging - it looks like the registration app is causing the issue here. Commenting it out seemed to let it work.

It looks like upgrading django-registration-redux and django-registration may have fixed the bug(!?!?!?) Forcing an update on it seemed to do the trick. Will confirm before closing ticket.

For my own curiosity - how difficult might it be to add more verbose logging to some of the migration/failure issues to indicate this specific kind of failure case? Happy to try and submit a patch if it makes sense - spent some time rooting around the migration/dependency loading classes so can take a stab if it makes sense.

Cheers!

[Tim Graham]

Yes, I ran into the lack of migrations issue with django-registration-redux when upgrading djangoproject.com.

There was #23741 to add a system check for problems between apps with and without migrations, but was closed since migrations will be required in Django 1.9.