Odtnhj

What is the difference between --fake-initial and --fake in Django migrations? What are the dangers of using fake migrations? Anybody knows? Thank you very much to all.

I am using django 1.10

Well the documentation is very clear about this

--fake-initial

Allows Django to skip an app’s initial migration if all database
tables with the names of all models created by all CreateModel
operations in that migration already exist. This option is intended
for use when first running migrations against a database that
preexisted the use of migrations. This option does not, however, check
for matching database schema beyond matching table names

You were asking about the risks, well here it is

only safe to use if you are confident that your existing schema
matches what is recorded in your initial migration.

--fake

Tells Django to mark the migrations as having been applied or
unapplied, but without actually running the SQL to change your
database schema.

This is intended for advanced users to manipulate the current
migration state directly if they’re manually applying changes;

Once again risks are clearly highlighted

be warned that using --fake runs the risk of putting the migration
state table into a state where manual recovery will be needed to make
migrations run correctly.

This answer is valid not just for django versions 1.8+ but for other versions as well.

edit Nov, 2018: I sometimes I see answers here and elsewhere that suggest that you should drop your databae. That's almost never the right thing to do. If you drop your database you loose all your data.

@e4c5 already gives an answer about this question, but I would like to add one more thing when to use --fake and --fake-initial.

Suppose you've already a database from production and you want to use it for development and apply migration without destroying the data in that case --fake-initial will comes handy.

This --fake-initial will force to look at your migration files, and basically skip the creation of tables that are already in your database. Do note, though that any migrations that don’t create tables but rather modify existing tables will be run.

Conversely, If you have an existing project with migration file and you want to reset the history of existing migration then --fake is usually being used.