South

About South

The original migration tool for Django before built-in migrations were added in Django 1.7. Still relevant for maintaining or upgrading legacy Django applications running older versions.

Key Features

• 1Pre-Django-1.7 migration framework providing schema and data migrations
• 2Supports forward and backward migration for rollback capability
• 3Auto-detection of model changes to generate migration files
• 4Data migrations to transform existing rows during schema changes
• 5Still works in Django 1.6 and older projects requiring long-term maintenance

How Python Data Engineers Use South

Engineers maintaining legacy Django projects running Django 1.6 or earlier use South to manage schema evolution. New projects should use Django's built-in migrations instead. For teams upgrading legacy codebases, South migrations can be converted to Django native migrations using the `manage.py migrate --run-syncdb` workflow.