What’s the recommended approach to resetting migration history using Django South?

If you need to selectively (for just one app) reset migrations that are taking too long, this worked for me.

rm <app-dir>/migrations/*
python manage.py schemamigration <app-name> --initial
python manage.py migrate <app-name> 0001 --fake  --delete-ghost-migrations

Don’t forget to manually restore any dependencies on other apps by adding lines like depends_on = (("<other_app_name>", "0001_initial"),("<yet_another_app_name>", "0001_initial")) to your <app-dir>/migrations/0001_initial.py file, as the first attribute in your migration class just below class Migration(SchemaMigration):.

You can then ./manage.py migrate <app-name> --fake --delete-ghost-migrations on other environments, per this SO answer. Of course if you fake the delete or fake the migrate zero you’ll need to manually delete any left-over db tables with a migration like this.

A more nuclear option is to ./manage.py migrate --fake --delete-ghost-migrations on the live deployment server followed by a [my]sqldump. Then pipe that dump into [my]sql on the environments where you need the migrated, fully-populated db. South sacrilege, I know, but worked for me.

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