Django 1.8b1: relation "auth_user" does not exist

[ivasic]

Seems that something is bothering Django 1.8b1 when applying migrations on PostgreSQL, even on a fresh django project without any apps (or any fancy stuff with custom models). Just create a new django project, add oauth2_provider to the installed apps and run "python manage.py test" to trigger it.

I've created a simple project that reproduces it here: http://cl.ly/3e1b0B1g0n2J (make sure you create a PostgreSQL db as per settings.py)

I should note that when I remove oauth2_provider from my installed apps, do the first migration (so that the auth_user table is created), put it back in installed apps and do another migration - then it works fine since auth_user table is created beforehand. Running tests, however, creates everything at once so it always triggers this problem and I'm unable to run any tests.

Environment: Django 1.8b1, django-oauth-toolkit 0.7.2, Python 3.4

Anyone knows if this is a Django 1.8 problem perhaps?

[chrisguitarguy]

This doesn't happen with Django 1.7.

manage.py test runs the migrate command, which fails with the same error:

django.db.utils.ProgrammingError: relation "auth_user" does not exist

From what I can tell, this happening because the syncdb Stuff, which creates the models for this library, runs before the migrations. The docs warn against this: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/migrations/#dependencies

Be aware, however, that unmigrated apps cannot depend on migrated apps, by the very nature of not having migrations. This means that it is not generally possible to have an unmigrated app have a ForeignKey or ManyToManyField to a migrated app; some cases may work, but it will eventually fail.

But there's a way around it!

As time goes on, more and more third-party apps will get migrations, but in the meantime you can either give them migrations yourself (using MIGRATION_MODULES to store those modules outside of the app’s own module if you wish), [...]

So in your settings, you can add something like this:

# makemigrations requires this for some reason or it errors
# Just set to the default value
OAUTH2_PROVIDER_APPLICATION_MODEL = 'oauth2_provider.Application'

# tell django where to put the oauth2 migrations
MIGRATION_MODULES = {
   # key: app name, value: a fully qualified package name, not the usual `app_label.something_else`
  'oauth2_provider': 'yourproject.migrations.oauth2_provider',
}

Then run ./manage.py makemigrations oauth2_provider to generate a new migration for this app.

Long term the solution seems to be migrating to django's internal migration system. I've not used south before, so not sure how much of a pain that is.

[ivasic]

Thanks Christopher, this worked great. Explicit migrations for oauth2_provider seem to solve the problem. I appreciate you looking into this one.

And indeed, all seems to work fine with Django 1.7. I'm experiencing this behaviour only on 1.8.

[dustinfarris]

Also see #224