Easy database and migrations reset during development

touch rm_migrations.py

Copy the code below to your newly created rm_migrations.py

from pathlib import Path


def main():
    apps_dir = Path() / "django_apps"
    excludes = ["__init__.py"]
    apps = set()
    for folder in apps_dir.iterdir():
        migration_dir = folder / "migrations"
        if not migration_dir.exists():
            continue
        for file in migration_dir.iterdir():
            if file.suffix == ".py" and file.name not in excludes:
                file.unlink()
                apps.add(str(folder))
                print(f"{str(file)} deleted")
    res = "\n".join(apps)
    print(f"\nRemoved migration files for apps: \n{res}")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Don't forget to update django_apps in the script to the folder where your django applications are placed. The value you put should be a string representing the path of your django applications folder relative to the folder where the script is placed. I suggest placing the script in the root of your project.

An example:

├── my_projects
│   ├── my_apps
│   ├── manage.py
│   ├── rm_migrations.py

With the setup describe above, you need to replace django_apps by my_apps.

Never push this file to production, accident happens, but you don't want them to happen on your production code / data. Add this line to your.gitignore file:

rm_migrations.py

Run the script with:

python rm_migrations.py

In the development phase, when the project idea is not fully formed or the product requirements are continually changing, it is common to completely rewrite or modify (in a non-migratable way) your django models, which requires cleaning up and recreating all your migration files. If your project consists of more than a few applications, deleting the files by hand is quite annoying. With the above script, you can easily in one command delete all your migration files 😎.

To reset my database (drop and recreate) I use the command below provided by the django-extensions package.

python manage.py reset_db --noinput