Best way to clear all history and start over?

[ristretto.rb]

Hello all,

On new projects, we often go through an initial development period
that ends up with a release, and then a subsequent maintenance period.

In the initial period we like using South because sometimes you just
don't want to drop all the data you have in your dev DB. But, more
importantly, we often run a reference implementation of projects for
various people that do not have local environments of their own.

When we get to release time, we generally drop all the application
tables and start over with fresh data. At this point, we'd like to
toss all the migrations we have up to that point, and start over. Our
new 001 migration should create the DB tables from the latest
approve-for-release models. And then any subsequent migrations will
be for bugs and features against the live system.

The way I just did it is this

1. Drop all the app tables.
2. Delete all the migrations for the app
3. Delete all records in the South History table

Is there an easier, saner, more proper way?

Thanks
Gene

[Andrew Godwin]

As long as you take care to do it on all deployments simultaneously,
there shouldn't be any problem with this. Personally, I'd do:

rm -r appname/migrations/
./manage.py reset south
./manage.py convert_to_south appname

(Notice that the "reset south" part clears migration records for ALL
apps, so make sure you either run the other two lines for all apps or
delete selectivey).

The convert_to_south call at the end makes a new migration and
fake-applies it (since your database already has the corresponding
tables). There's no need to drop all the app tables during the process.

Andrew