1.7 Andrew Godwin @andrewgodwin & you 

Andrew Godwin Author of South migrations library Hi, I'm Author of 1.7 Django migrations Generally far too involved in Django 

Django 1.7 Migrations Scheduled release: May 15th (we'll probably miss it) App loading refactor Checks framework select_related filters Custom lookups 

Migrations They're pretty good. 

The (second) Plan Django Schema backend ORM Hooks South 2 Migration handling User interface Backport for 1.4 - 1.6 

Logically Separate Schema backend ORM Hooks Migration handling User interface SchemaEditor Migrations 

A New Format More concise Declarative Introspectable 

Migration actions Frozen ORM 

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In-memory running Creates models from migration sets Autodetector diffs created from on-disk Used to feed SchemaEditor / ORM 

Backwards Compatability Auto-applies first migration if tables exist Ignores South-style migrations South will start looking for south_migrations 

App Loading Mostly internal change App objects per-app Start of long path away from settings 

Checks Framework Proper support for project-level validation Old validation moved in Upgrade warnings now possible 

from django.core.checks import register @register() def example_check(app_configs, **kwargs): errors = [] # ... your check logic here return errors 

prefetch_related control Now accepts a Prefetch object Can customise order, select_related, or filter 

Pizza.objects.prefetch_related( Prefetch( 'restaurants', queryset=Restaurant.objects.select_related('best_pizza'), ) ) 

Custom Lookups Allows for more powerful Field subclasses You can stop using .extra() and .raw() as much 

from django.db.models import Lookup class NotEqual(Lookup): lookup_name = 'ne' def as_sql(self, qn, connection): lhs, lhs_params = self.process_lhs(qn, connection) rhs, rhs_params = self.process_rhs(qn, connection) params = lhs_params + rhs_params return '%s <> %s' % (lhs, rhs), params 

Important Upgrade Notes 

Fields need deconstruct() It's a required new method for all fields. 

syncdb is deprecated Use migrate (old apps will still work) 

initial_data is dead Use data migrations and the ORM instead 

Django 1.8? LTS Migrations for contrib apps PostgreSQL improvements? 

Thanks. @andrewgodwin aeracode.org