How to Revert the Last Migration?

Naveera A.

—October 21, 2022

The ProblemThe Problem

You made changes to a model and made migrations, but you’ve realized it wasn’t the right thing to do and would like to revert. How can you do that without making a new migration?

How can you revert the last migration in Django?

The SolutionThe Solution

You can reverse a migration using the migrate command with the number of the previous migration.

Let’s say you have an app called recipes.

You can see a list of all the migrations in the migrations folder or by running the following command:

python manage.py showmigrations recipes

You may have the following migrations in your recipes app:

• 0001_initial.py
• 0002_recipepage.py
• 0003_recipeindex.py

If you want to undo the 0003_recipeindex migration, you can do it like so:

python manage.py migrate recipes 0002_recipepage

You can shorten the command by leaving out the full migration name. Just use the migration number:

python manage.py migrate recipes 0002

Make sure that everything is working the way it should, then you can delete 0003_recipeindex.py.

If you want to reverse all migrations for your app, you can use the name zero, like so:

python manage.py migrate recipes zero

Keep in mind that certain irreversible operations can make a migration irreversible. If you try to reverse an irreversible migration, you will get an IrreversibleError.

You can read more about Django migrations on the official documentation.