Our website has been running Django 1.6 since it was built in 2014. Django has moved on to newer versions since then. I’ve been contemplating updating it, but never found enough time. At one point, we decided to scrap the Django website and move to WordPress. Eventually, the convinience of Django won over. This mean, I had the unenviable task of upgrading Django. It took about a good 2 weeks of work in total. I took a few breaks to solve problems that I ran into. Here’s a sort of summary of problems I’ve found and how I solved them.
Django-CMS is only compatible with Django 1.8 and not Django 1.9. I didn’t catch it the first time. That was my first mistake. After that, I pinned it to the latest version of Django 1.8.
We were using South and I had to convert from South to Django’s migrations. When I did this migration, I got a traceback from Django-CMS at the python manage.py migrate --fake-initial step. Turns out one of those migrations needs to faked. So, I ended up doing this:
python manage.py migrate --fake-initial cms --app python manage.py migrate --fake cms 0002_auto_20140816_1918 python manage.py migrate --fake-initial cms python manage.py migrate --fake-initial We had a custom submenu plugin. This just plain stopped working. Turns out Django CMS made a few backward incompatible changes causing this breakage. This caused most pages to plain fail. It took me a long time to realize I should turn off all the plugins and enable them one at a time to discover the failure. The traceback in this instance didn’t help me pinpoint the error at all!
We shipped a bunch of dependencies with our code instead of installing the plugin. A few plugins had blocker bugs, which we fixed in our “fork”, and shipped. The bugs were now fixed in the plugin and we could remove the in-code forks and just use them as dependencies. This bit was annoying but not too painful. Once I removed them from the code, we had a lighter footprint for our code and easier path to upgrades.
This took me about one full month of work on and off. I would often run into problems. I forced myself to take a break when I was stuck. It often made me think of different approaches to the problem at hand. I’ll be handing over this codebase to someone else soon, and I’m much happier at the state I’m leaving it. It’s better than what it used to be when I started. After all, that’s pretty much what our job is, right?
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