Dealing with Unapplied Migration Warnings - Django

In Django, unapplied migration warnings occur when your database schema is out of sync with your models. This usually happens after creating or modifying models but not applying the migrations.

Project Setup

Create and setup a Django project. After setup, the directory structure may contain two folders with the same name.

• The outer folder serves as the project container and can be renamed.
• The inner folder contains the actual project settings and should not be renamed, as Django depends on this name internally.

For example, renaming the outer folder to geeksforgeeks will result in the following structure:

Unapplied Migrations Warning

Running the server with:

python manage.py runserver

May show a warning like:

You have 15 unapplied migrations. Your project may not work properly until you apply the migrations.

This indicates pending database schema changes that need to be applied.

Fixing the Warning

Stop the server with CTRL+C and run:

python manage.py migrate

The command prompt will display output similar to the following:

This applies all pending migrations and sets up the database schema. Restart the server:

python manage.py runserver

The warning will be resolved.

Organizing Django Apps

As the project grows, it is best practice to move functionality into separate apps for modularity and maintainability.

For example, a simple function-based view in views.py:

from django.http import HttpResponse

def hello_geeks(request):
    return HttpResponse("Hello, Geeks!")

can be routed in urls.py:

from geeks_site.views import hello_geeks

urlpatterns = [
    path('geek/', hello_geeks),
]

This structure keeps the project organized while preventing migration warnings and maintaining clean separation of features.

Common Issues & Fixes