Testing for missing migrations in Django | Tech blog

Since version 1.7, Django creates migrations for more than just changes to your model fields. It’s easy to forget to create a migration after changing, say, the verbose_name_plural of a model class - I’ve done this many times. This can lead to a mess down the line when multiple developers all end up creating the same migration in separate branches.

You can avoid this situation by checking for missing migrations in your test suite:

from StringIO import StringIO
from django.core.management import call_command
import pytest

def test_for_missing_migrations():
    output = StringIO()
    try:
        call_command(
            'makemigrations', interactive=False, dry_run=True, exit_code=True,
            stdout=output)
    except SystemExit as e:
        # The exit code will be 1 when there are no missing migrations
        assert unicode(e) == '1'
    else:
        pytest.fail("There are missing migrations:\n %s" % output.getvalue())

Here we call the makemigrations command in “dry-run” mode and test the exit code to determine if there are any missing migrations. If there are missing migrations, the test will fail and print the captured output from the makemigrations command.

Note that if you are using a custom MIGRATION_MODULES setting to avoid applying migrations during tests, you need to restore its default value for the above command to work:

from StringIO import StringIO
from django.core.management import call_command
from django.test import override_settings
import pytest

@override_settings(MIGRATION_MODULES={})
def test_for_missing_migrations():
    output = StringIO()
    try:
        call_command(
            'makemigrations', interactive=False, dry_run=True, exit_code=True,
            stdout=output)
    except SystemExit as e:
        # The exit code will be 1 when there are no missing migrations
        assert unicode(e) == '1'
    else:
        pytest.fail("There are missing migrations:\n %s" % output.getvalue())

Credit for this implementation belongs to Mozilla’s Ed Morley, who committed a similar fix for their treeherder project. The above snippets are slightly extended versions of his original.