South migration error: NoMigrations exception for django.contrib.auth

Question

I have been using South on my project for a while, but I recently did a huge amount of development and changed development machine and I think something messed up in the process. The project works fine, but I can't apply migrations. Whenever I try to apply a migration I get the following traceback:

danpalmer:pest Dan$ python manage.py migrate frontend
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "manage.py", line 11, in <module>
    execute_manager(settings)
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 362, in execute_manager
    utility.execute()
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 303, in execute
    self.fetch_command(subcommand).run_from_argv(self.argv)
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 195, in run_from_argv
    self.execute(*args, **options.__dict__)
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/django/core/management/base.py", line 222, in execute
    output = self.handle(*args, **options)
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/South-0.7-py2.6.egg/south/management/commands/migrate.py", line 102, in handle
    delete_ghosts = delete_ghosts,
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/South-0.7-py2.6.egg/south/migration/__init__.py", line 182, in migrate_app
    applied = check_migration_histories(applied, delete_ghosts)
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/South-0.7-py2.6.egg/south/migration/__init__.py", line 85, in check_migration_histories
    m = h.get_migration()
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/South-0.7-py2.6.egg/south/models.py", line 34, in get_migration
    return self.get_migrations().migration(self.migration)
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/South-0.7-py2.6.egg/south/models.py", line 31, in get_migrations
    return Migrations(self.app_name)
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/South-0.7-py2.6.egg/south/migration/base.py", line 60, in __call__
    self.instances[app_label] = super(MigrationsMetaclass, self).__call__(app_label_to_app_module(app_label), **kwds)
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/South-0.7-py2.6.egg/south/migration/base.py", line 88, in __init__
    self.set_application(application, force_creation, verbose_creation)
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/South-0.7-py2.6.egg/south/migration/base.py", line 159, in set_application
    raise exceptions.NoMigrations(application)
south.exceptions.NoMigrations: Application '<module 'django.contrib.auth' from '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/django/contrib/auth/__init__.pyc'>' has no migrations.

I am not that experienced with South and I haven't met this error before. The only helpful mention I can find online about this error is for pre-0.7 I think and I am on South 0.7. I ran 'easy_install -U South' just to make sure.

Thanks for any help that you can provide. I really appreciate it.

Answer 1

I solved the problem.

Obviously, you can't use South to do the migrations for the apps that are part of Django, like 'auth' so I didn't know why it was trying to.

I realised that for a while I had another app within my project called auth. I must have tried to migrate this at some point before renaming it and therefore messed it all up.

I removed the migration history entries from the database for that app and everything was fine.

Answer 2

Leaving this here for future googlers

I recently ran into this exceptions with one of my own apps today, not a contrib one.

After a bit of head-scratching I noticed that somehow the file ...

 app/migrations/__init__.py

... had been deleted, which means python cant import the dir as a module etc etc.