migrate with "--fake" option modifies the database

[mandm]

I made a migration and tested it on development server. When I pushed the changes to production server, I ran

manage.py migrate --fake

This printed the message that the migration was faked. After this, when I actually tried to apply the migration with

manage.py migrate

I got a message No migrations to apply. (Indeed --list showed that the migration was applied). I dumped the database and found that the migration was marked as applied (in django_migrations table & django_migrations_id_seq was incremented). However the actual change that the migration was intended for, was not applied to the database.

I've tested this on PgSQL 9.4 & Django 1.7.

[Sergey Fedoseev]

This is intended behavior:

python manage.py help migrate
...
  --fake                Mark migrations as run without actually running them.
...

[Josh Smeaton]

If you're looking to test the output of the migration perhaps you might want to use the sqlmigrate command ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/django-admin/#sqlmigrate-app-label-migrationname

[mandm]

Is there a way to undo --fake for manually created migrations file (if reverse_sql isn't available) ?

[Shai Berger]

You can use --fake also when migrating backwards, thus undoing your original --fake (but beware if you have other migrations depending on your migration). How you created the migration file is irrelevant.

In the future, please use the designated support channels (IRC channel #django on freenode, or django-users mailing list) rather than the bug tracker for this kind of question.