Changing fieldnames with django 1.7

It took me a little searching to learn how to do this.  Unlike most migrations, django can't generate name changes automatically.

StackOverflow has a recipe for changing the name of a model and a couple of fields:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25091130/django-migration-strategy-for-renaming-a-model-and-relationship-fields

I simplified that recipe for the case when you only want to change a single field name:

https://gist.github.com/dhbradshaw/e2bdeb502b0d0d2acced

database migrations in django 1.7+

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24311993/how-to-add-a-new-field-to-a-model-with-new-django-migrations

I found migrations a bit sticky in a couple of my applications because I didn't initialize migrations right off.  Anyway, this link has a nice set of instructions that includes the case where you didn't start off initialized.

From the link:

To answer your question, with the new migration introduced in Django 1.7, in order to add a new field to a model you can simply add that field to your model and initialize migrations with ./manage.py makemigrations and then run ./manage.py migrate and the new field will be added to your db. To avoid dealing with errors for your existing models however, you can use the --fake:

1. Initialize migrations for your existing models:
   

   ./manage.py makemigrations myapp

2. Fake migrations for existing models:
   

   ./manage.py migrate --fake myapp

3. Add the new field to myapp.models:
   

   from django.db import models
   
   class MyModel(models.Model):
   ... #existing fields
   newfield = models.CharField(max_length=100) #new field

4. Run makemigrations again (this will add a new migration file in migrations folder that add the newfield to db):
   

   ./manage.py makemigrations myapp

5. Run migrate again:
   

   ./manage.py migrate myapp