Converting an app to use South is very easy:
- Edit your settings.py and put ‘south’ into INSTALLED_APPS (assuming you’ve installed it to the right place)
- Run ./manage.py syncdb to load the South table into the database. Note that syncdb looks different now - South modifies it.
- Run ./manage.py convert_to_south myapp - South will automatically make and pretend to apply your first migration.
The convert_to_south command only works entirely on the first machine you run it on. Once you’ve committed the initial migrations it made into the database, you’ll have to run ./manage.py migrate myapp 0001 --fake on every machine that has a copy of the codebase (make sure they were up-to-date with models and schema first).
Remember that new installations of the codebase after this don’t need these steps; you need only do a syncdb then a normal migrate.