Django Evolution 2.1

Release date: November 16, 2020

New Features

Dependency management for evolutions and migrations.

Evolutions can now specify other evolutions and migrations that must be applied either before or after. This allows evolutions to, for instance, introduce a model that would be required by another migration (useful for Django apps that have migrations that depend on a swappable model specified in settings).

Django Evolution will determine the correct order in which to apply migrations and evolutions, so as to correctly create or update the database.

Dependencies can be defined per-evolution or per-app. They can depend on specific evolutions or on app evolutions for an app, or on specific migrations.

See Adding Dependencies for more information.
Improved transaction management.

Transactions are managed a bit more closely now, allowing more operations to be performed in a transaction at a time and for those operations to be rolled back if anything goes wrong. This should improve reliability of an upgrade.

Fixed the order in which models are created.

There was a regression in 2.0 where models could be created in the wrong order, causing issues with applying constraints between those models.
Fixed error messages in places if stored schema signatures were missing.

Previously, some missing schema signatures could lead to outright crashes, if things went wrong. There’s now checks in more places to ensure there’s at least a reasonable error message.

Fixed preserving the db_index= values for fields on Django 1.8 through 1.10.

These versions of Django “temporarily” unset the db_index attribute on fields when generating SQL for creating indexes, and then never restore it. We now monkey-patch these versions of Django to restore these values.