Question: When upgrading to Django 1.8 (with zc.buildout) and running syncdb or migrate, I get this message:

`django.db.utils.ProgrammingError: relation "auth_user" does not exist`

One of my models contains django.contrib.auth.models.User:

```
user = models.ForeignKey(
    User, related_name='%(app_label)s_%(class)s_user',
    blank=True, null=True, editable=False
)

```

Downgrading to Django 1.7 removes the error. Do I have to include the User object differently in Django 1.8?

Answer: 
On my environment, I fix this running `makemigrations` on all apps that have relationship with `django.contrib.auth.models`:

```

manage.py makemigrations app_with_user_relation
manage.py migrate

```
Maybe you have found the answer and resolved the problem, but I wanted to point out that, in my case, the above problem was solved by dropping the database and re-creating it again, with the full privileges of the users. I was able to do this because I'm working on a non-production environment, but doing this on a staging environment is not a good idea, so be careful.

Im using `python 2.7.12` and following are the specifications of my virtualenv:

```
Django==1.10.5
django-crispy-forms==1.6.1
django-registration-redux==1.4
djangorestframework==3.5.3
olefile==0.44
packaging==16.8
Pillow==4.0.0
psycopg2==2.6.2

```