I got tired of struggling with South so I actually ended up doing this differently and it worked out nicely for my particular situation:
First, I made it work with ./manage.py dumpdata, fixing up the dump, and then ./manage.py loaddata, which worked. Then I realized I could do basically the same thing with a single, self-contained script that only loads necessary django settings and does the serialization/deserialization directly.
Self-contained python script
## userconverter.py ##
import json
from django.conf import settings
settings.configure(
DATABASES={
# copy DATABASES configuration from your settings file here, or import it directly from your settings file (but not from django.conf.settings) or use dj_database_url
},
SITE_ID = 1, # because my custom user implicates contrib.sites (which is why it's in INSTALLED_APPS too)
INSTALLED_APPS = ['django.contrib.sites', 'django.contrib.auth', 'myapp'])
# some things you have to import after you configure the settings
from django.core import serializers
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
# this isn't optimized for huge amounts of data -- use streaming techniques rather than loads/dumps if that is your case
old_users = json.loads(serializers.serialize('json', User.objects.all()))
for user in old_users:
user['pk'] = None
user['model'] = "myapp.siteuser"
user['fields']["site"] = settings['SITE_ID']
for new_user in serializers.deserialize('json', json.dumps(old_users)):
new_user.save()
With dumpdata/loaddata
I did the following:
1) ./manage.py dumpdata auth.User
2) Script to convert auth.user data to new user. (or just manually search and replace in your favorite text editor or grep) Mine looked something like:
def convert_user_dump(filename, site_id):
file = open(filename, 'r')
contents = file.read()
file.close()
user_list = json.loads(contents)
for user in user_list:
user['pk'] = None # it will auto-increment
user['model'] = "myapp.siteuser"
user['fields']["site"] = side_id
contents = json.dumps(user_list)
file = open(filename, 'w')
file.write(contents)
file.close()
3) ./manage.py loaddata filename
4) set AUTH_USER_MODEL
*Side Note: One critical part of doing this type of migration, regardless of which technique you use (South, serialization/modification/deserialization, or otherwise) is that as soon as you set AUTH_USER_MODEL to your custom model in the current settings, django cuts you off from auth.User, even if the table still exists.*
