What's the right way to handle an initial database migration in Django?
You're going wrong at the very end -- yes, you do need to call manage.py makemigrations <appname> for each of your apps once. It's not automatically done for all apps.
Presumably that is because Django has no way of knowing if that is what you want to do (especially if some apps were downloaded from PyPI, etc). And a single command per app can't really be an extreme amount of work, right?
I'm in the process of preparing a Django application for its initial production release, and I have deployed development instances of it in a few different environments. One thing that I can't quite get happening as smoothly as I'd like is the initial database migration. Given a fresh installation of Django, a deployment of my application from version control, and a clean database, manage.py migrate will handle the initial creation of all tables (both Django's and my models'). That's great, but it doesn't actually create the initial migration files for my apps. This leads to a problem down the road when I need to deploy code changes that require a new database migration, because there's no basis for Django to compute the deltas.
I've tried running manage.py makemigrations as the first step in the deployment, in the hopes that it would create the migration files, but it reports that there are no changes to migrate. The only way I've found to get the baseline state that I need is to run manage.py makemigrations [appname] for each of my apps. Shouldn't makemigrations, called without a specific app name, pick up all the installed apps and create their migrations? Where am I going wrong?