[Django]-Migrating from django user model to a custom user model

You have to clear admin, auth, contenttypes, and sessions from the migration history and also drop the tables. First, remove the migration folders of your apps and then type the following:

python manage.py migrate admin zero
python manage.py migrate auth zero
python manage.py migrate contenttypes zero
python manage.py migrate sessions zero

Afterwards, you can run makemigrations accounts and migrate accounts.

The solution is to undo your existing migrations that depend on AUTH_USER_MODEL as mentioned in this answer. In case you are trying to undo migrations for admin, auth, contenttypes and sessions and you get an error like:

ERRORS:
auth.User.groups: (fields.E304) Reverse accessor for ‘User.groups’ clashes with reverse accessor for ‘Profile.groups’.
….

• First of all comment out/undo AUTH_USER_MODEL in settings.py if you had changed that.
• Secondly comment out/undo your django app that contains new AUTH_MODEL from INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py.
• Now you should be able to undo migrations for auth, admin, contenttypes and sessions as:

python manage.py migrate admin zero
python manage.py migrate auth zero
python manage.py migrate contenttypes zero
python manage.py migrate sessions zero

• Now add your auth model app to INSTALLED_APPS and set AUTH_USER_MODEL in your settings.py again.

• Run: python manage.py migrate AUTH_APP, you may need to make migrations for your auth model app as well: python manage.py makemigrations AUTH_APP

• Apply all migrations that you undo by: python manage.py migrate.

You are all done.

Note: You will lose all existing users present in database.

As in my particular case, the other answers did not help (the error still occured even after I tried to drop the tables with migrate ... zero and even after I deleted the migrations folder), the following helped, but I was at the very beginning and therefore it was no problem to just delete the db.sqlite3 file which is created whenever you migrate the first time. (Depending on your settings.py you might have a different database-file).

You really can only do this if you are sure that you don’t lose important data from your database file (e.g. you do not yet have much information stored in the database and it is not difficult to start over again), and you will need to migrate everything again.

Delete the existing all the tables from data base.[Note : data will be lost]

Delete pycache and migrations from all the apps.

Run migrations for your relative app:

python manage.py makemigrations users

Migrate the tables to database:

python manage.py migrate

You need to run:

python manage.py makemigrations accounts

Before executing the initial manage.py migrate (by initial I mean at the very first time you run migrate on your project)

It is recommended to set up your custom User model at the start of your project so you’ll have the "accounts" app migrated at the same time as the admin,auth,contenttypes,sessions tables are created.

But if you have created your tables already, then you should follow the instructions as @krishna-chandak described: https://stackoverflow.com/a/53599345/5950111

You can read the docs : https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/topics/auth/customizing/#using-a-custom-user-model-when-starting-a-project

There’s a django_migrations table in your database after your previous migration which is the cause of this inconsistency.
Solution: Deleting the django_migrations table from your database.
delete the migration folder from your apps

and then perform

python3 manage.py makemigrations 
python3 manage.py migrate

I know it’s rather an old question, but for people googling this topic like me today, here is a solution without deleting migrations, dropping the tables, and other nasty stuff)

https://www.caktusgroup.com/blog/2019/04/26/how-switch-custom-django-user-model-mid-project/

I also had the same problem. I followed the steps:

1. In models.py, i setup basic User model

# accounts/models.py
class User(AbstractBaseUser):
    class Meta:
        db_table = 'auth_user'

2. Then, i ran makemigrations command to generate migration file

$ python manage.py makemigrations accounts
Migrations for 'accounts':
  accounts/migrations/0001_initial.py:
    - Create model User

3. Next step, i inserted record has 0001_initial todjango_migrations table

$ echo "INSERT INTO django_migrations (app, name, applied) VALUES ('accounts', '0001_initial', CURRENT_TIMESTAMP);" | python manage.py dbshell

4. Update lastest in model

# accounts/models.py
class User(AbstractBaseUser, PermissionsMixin):
    email = models.EmailField(
        unique=True,
        max_length=254,
    )
    mobile_number = models.IntegerField(unique=True)
    is_active = models.BooleanField(default=True)
    is_admin = models.BooleanField(default=False)

    objects = UserManager()
    ...
    ...    
    class Meta:
        db_table = 'auth_user'
    ...
    ...

5. I need makemigrations again

After run makemigrations, i had the next migration file.

0002_....py

6. Migrate agains

python manage.py migrate.

What worked for me was a solution that I pieced togeather from all the diffretent solutions given here.

I check if the database exists since I don’t have an issue with an existing database, only when the database is empty.

# check if the database exists
db_ok=false
if python ./manage.py check; then
  db_ok=true
fi

if [ $db_ok = true ]; then
  # database exists: do a normal migrate
  python ./manage.py migrate
else
  # database does not exists, make and migrate users then a migrate and cleanup of the users migraton
  python ./manage.py makemigrations users
  python ./manage.py migrate users
  python ./manage.py migrate
  rm -r users/migrations/
fi

I had similar problem, where I have to introduce the custom user model in the middle of the project. So following steps helped me to solve the issue without table drop or data loss.

(1) Create an initial empty migration for the app (‘accounts’)

python manage.py makemigrations accounts --empty

(2) Run migrate

python manage.py migrate

(3) Update the timestamp in the django_migrations table in the database , for ‘accounts’ initial migration to the ‘admin’ initial timestamp.

UPDATE django_migrations SET applied=<<admin 0001_initial date>> WHERE app='accounts' and name='0001_initial'; 

(4) Now create your Custom User model (derived from AbstractUser) with out any fields, and set the table name to auth_user. You are basically re-using the existing auth user table in database.

class User(AbstractUser):
    class Meta:
        db_table = 'auth_user'

(4) Now run migration, and copy the migration to 0001_initial and remove ‘0001_initial’ from the dependency array. Also remove the newly created migration file.

python manage.py makemigrations accounts
cp accounts/migrations/0002_user.py accounts/migrations/0001_initial.py
edit the file 0001_initial.py
rm accounts/migrations/0002_user.py  (remove migration file)

(5) Now add your custom fields, run makemigrations and migrate as usual.

First, dump your data to a file data.json using this command :

python manage.py dumpdata app1.model1 app2.model2 ...... 

After you run this command:

 python manage.py makemigrations

Just remove the db.sqlite3 file using the command

rm db.sqlite3

then run the command:

python manage.py migrate

then run the command:

python manage.py loaddata data.json

It worked for me.

Migrate zeroing didn’t help me. I had to drop the whole database:

sudo -u postgres psql
drop database YOURDATABASENAME;
create database YOURDATABASENAME;

Then:

python ./manage.py makemigrations MYAPPNAME
python ./manage.py migrate MYAPPNAME
python ./manage.py migrate

And after these I got forward..