2024-01-05 Collapsing Django’s Migrations

• https://danielquinn.org/blog/collapsing-djangos-migrations/

• https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/migrations/

• https://realpython.com/django-migrations-a-primer/

Long-running Django projects can start to create a lot of migrations.

After just a few years, an actively developed project can create thousands of them!

This can put a serious dent in your test running, because (a) Django runs the migrations at test time to setup your database, and (b) you can’t test your migrations unless you’re happy to have 30min CI runs!

Migrations can also often be a painful source of technical debt, since they sometimes import libraries that you don’t use anymore, but can’t remove because someone, some day will try to run manage.py migrate from scratch only to have it blow up looking for a dependency you don’t actually use anymore.

So, looking down the barrel of a performance, tech debt, and stability headache, it’s a good idea to pay some attention to your migrations from time to time.