Order of migration dependencies when running makemigrations from scratch

[Dakota Hawkins]

We haven't really deployed yet, so generally to make migrations we're
deleting existing migration files and re-running makemigrations.

We have two apps, and one of them depends on the other as well as
django.contrib.auth. In that app's migrations the dependencies often swap
order seemingly indeterminately.

[image: migrations.png]
The resulting migration includes either:

class Migration(migrations.Migration):
initial = True
dependencies = [
('auth', '0009_alter_user_last_name_max_length'),
('app2', '0001_initial'),
]
...


or:

class Migration(migrations.Migration):
initial = True
dependencies = [
('app2', '0001_initial'),
('auth', '0009_alter_user_last_name_max_length'),
]
...


and it seems to switch back and forth with nearly every run.

Does anybody know why, or how to nail down the order? It doesn't seem to
make a technical difference, but I'd like to avoid the churn/noise in our
repo.

[Simon Charette]

Hello Dakota,

Migration.dependencies should really have been defined as a set from the
start
as Django doesn't care about their order anyway.

I unfortunately cannot provide a work around but I suggest you submit an
improvement/cleanup ticket to make the order deterministic. It should be
a simple matter of using sorted in MigrationWriter.as_string[0].

Cheers,
Simon

[0]
https://github.com/django/django/blob/79c196cfb287893aadc6b0e74603ffde1512170e/django/db/migrations/writer.py#L156-L164

Post by Dakota Hawkins
We haven't really deployed yet, so generally to make migrations we're
deleting existing migration files and re-running makemigrations.
We have two apps, and one of them depends on the other as well as
django.contrib.auth. In that app's migrations the dependencies often swap
order seemingly indeterminately.
[image: migrations.png]
initial = True
dependencies = [
('auth', '0009_alter_user_last_name_max_length'),
('app2', '0001_initial'),
]
...
initial = True
dependencies = [
('app2', '0001_initial'),
('auth', '0009_alter_user_last_name_max_length'),
]
...
and it seems to switch back and forth with nearly every run.
Does anybody know why, or how to nail down the order? It doesn't seem to
make a technical difference, but I'd like to avoid the churn/noise in our
repo.