How to Create Django Data Migrations

Data Migration is a very convenient way to change the data in the database in conjunction with changes in the schema. They work like a regular schema migration. Django keep track of dependencies, order of execution and if the application already applied a given data migration or not.

A common use case of data migrations is when we need to introduce new fields that are non-nullable. Or when we are creating a new field to store a cached count of something, so we can create the new field and add the initial count.

In this post we are going to explore a simple example that you can very easily extend and modify for your needs.

Data Migrations

Let’s suppose we have an app named blog, which is installed in our project’s INSTALLED_APPS.

The blog have the following model definition:

blog/models.py

from django.db import models

class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    content = models.TextField()

    def __str__(self):
        return self.title

 

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