How to move a model between two Django apps

Let's imagine that you have 2 django apps: article and blog. So first one has model Article as you already guessed. So we need to move our Article model from article app to blog app.

• Copy your code of Article model from article app to blog app into models.py.
• We need to specify database table for our moved model. At our example it is article_article. You need to add to your blog.Article model next lines:

class Meta:
    db_table = 'article_article'

• Now you can python manage.py makemigrations blog for getting django migration for creating model or you could get creation migration from your article app and place it to migrated migration in blog app. If you run above command, you need to delete this migration after place it into previously migrated migration.

• Now you need to change all references in your whole project to new new reference of your model. It can be ForeignKey, import etc.

• Verify that you do all correctly with command: ./manage.py migrate. Nothing should be migrated. If not - verify previous steps, because we just changed place of your model code, not database table name.

• Last step will be remove db_table field from class Meta and run next command:

./manage.py makemigrations blog
./manage.py migrate blog

After create migration you could see something next operation at migration:

operations = [
        migrations.AlterModelTable(
            name='blog',
            table=None,
        ),
    ]

table=None means it will take the default table-name, which in this case will be blog_article.

This solution was tested with Django 1.11 and Postgres database with ForeignKey relation.

Hope it helps.