Django - Deprecate Field
May 7, 2026 ยท View on GitHub
Installation
pip install django-deprecate-fields
Usage
Assume the simple following model:
from django.db import models
class MyModel(models.Model):
field1 = models.CharField()
field2 = models.CharField()
In order to remove field1, it should first be marked as deprecated:
from django.db import models
from django_deprecate_fields import deprecate_field
class MyModel(models.Model):
field1 = deprecate_field(models.CharField())
field2 = models.CharField()
Secondly, makemigrations should be called, which will change the field to be nullable. Any lingering references to it
in your code will return None (or optionally any value or callable passed to deprecate_field as the
return_instead argument)
Lastly, after the changes above have been deployed, field1 can then safely be removed in the model (plus another
makemigrations run)
Custom django commands
If you need the actual field to be returned when a django command other
than makemigrations, migrate or showmigrations is run, you can specify the
DEPRECATE_FIELD_CUSTOM_MIGRATION_COMMAND parameter in the settings.
For instance if you generate migrations with pgmakemigrations instead of makemigrations,
you can add this to your settings:
DEPRECATE_FIELD_CUSTOM_MIGRATION_COMMAND = {"pgmakemigrations"}
Contributing
First of all, thank you very much for contributing to this project. Please base
your work on the master branch and target master in your pull request.
Running tests
Install the package in editable mode and run the test suite:
pip install -e .
./manage.py test tests --no-input
To test against a specific Python and Django version combination, use tox:
pip install tox
tox -e py313-django60
To see a coverage report:
tox -e coverage
License
django-deprecate-fields is released under the Apache 2.0 License.