[rowanseymour]

Maybe you need to turn this into an article because over the last decade of working with Django, we've learnt the same lessons, sometimes the hard way. Learning to never import real models into data migrations was a big one.

I recently wanted to move a model between apps and ended up going the route of create new table, copy all rows over, delete old table. It was annoying, but the only way to make it work with regular migrations.

We ended up writing our own script[1] to squash migrations, and I'd love to know if there's a better way. We needed something that works for clean installs or existing installs that already have the current migrations installed - so it generates empty migrations which get applied on existing installs, and then they get replaced with real initial migrations on clean installs starting from a new release.

1. https://github.com/nyaruka/rapidpro/blob/main/tools/squash_m...