Question

I have a little website with a few users and I’d like to add a field to one of my models (and hence tables.) The problem is that syncdb of course won’t touch the existing models and I’m trying to figure out how to add this field to the model/table without having to repopulate the entire thing.

Example:

class Newspaper(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField()

class UserProfile(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(user, unique=True)
    reads = models.ManyToManyField(Newspaper)

Now I’d like to add a URL field (blank=True) to the Newspaper model without breaking the user profiles.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

There’s no built-in way to do this. However there are a number of third-party projects that will do it for you. The two leading ones are called South and django-evolution, although there are various others as well (including one I’ve been involved with, dmigrations).

I would definitely recommend South – it has a number of really neat features and works really well.