Upgrading from Django 1.4 to Django 1.7 - will it work?

I want to be clear that this is a distilled version of the answers found in the link provided harshil

above. I am adding it here in case the url breaks in the future as it helped me.

• ADD A SECRET_KEY
  
  TO YOURSETTINGS.PY
  
  

Changed in Django 1.5, Django now requires every project to have a SECRET_KEY.

2. CONCEPT OF STATEMENTS AND APPLICATION STATEMENTS IN 1.7:

This is a new concept introduced in version 1.7, where Django maintains a registry of your installed apps, so it makes it easier to manage and introspect all of your apps. The best part I liked about this feature is that it makes subapps easier to manage and also runs the initialization code when each app is ready.

You can read more about this here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/ref/applications/

3. UPDATING DJANGO TEMP URL TO USE NEW SYNTAX INTRODUCED IN DJANGO 1.5:

If you've used Djangos before {% load url from future %}

, you can skip this step, but if you're not sure, you should now change url tags from {% url view_name args %}

to {% url 'view_name' args %}

.

There is this awesome sed command that you can use to convert all your urls to the new format. You can run this command from your template directory

sed -i -r -e "s#\{% url ([a-zA-Z0-9_.:-]+)#\{% url '\1'#g" *

or to run it recursively, you can run the following:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i -r -e "s#\{% url ([a-zA-Z0-9_.:-]+)#\{% url '\1'#g"

Credit goes to Enrico for posting this label here .

4. APP LABORATORS

While migrating from Django 1.4 I had problems where new django migrations (this is the next topic) had problems recognizing which "application this model belongs to". Typically, I would just add app_label to all Meta models and set it to the package (folder) name.

5. MIGRATION

With Django 1.7 you no longer need to go south as migrations are now built in. The best way to migrate from south

to django migrations is to remove all migration files from your migrations folder (leave there __init__.py

).

Do the following to create all new migrations:

python manage.py makemigrations

and then migrate (if django sees the table already exists then it won't run those migrations)

python manage.py migrate

5. URLS.PY

You can have the following in all of your urls.py

from django.conf.urls.defaults import patterns, include, url

You will want to replace this with: from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, url

6. HTTPResponse

If there is any code that manually sets the mimetype of the HttpResponse, you will need to change it to content_type.

HttpResponse({"message": "hello world!"}, mimetype="application/json")

becomes HttpResponse({"message": "hello world!"}, content_type="application/json")

7. GET_QUERY_SET

The method is get_query_set

deprecated, preferring get_queryset

. Therefore, you will also need to change this if you have previously overridden the method get_query_set

.

8. CACHING

If you've used ORM caching, for example johnny-cache

, you need to either kill it, quit it, or upgrade to something like django-cachalot

.

9. PLUGINS:

Don't forget to update all your requirements and plugins. Many older plugins may not be compatible with Django 1.7.

10. Switching to celery> = 3.1.16