django 1.8 fails to django.db.utils.ProgrammingError: relation “auth_user” does not exist

I didn't like the idea of commenting/uncommenting code, so I tried a different approach: I migrated "manually" some apps, and then run django-admin.py migrate for the remaining ones. After deleting all the *.pyc files, my sequence of commands was:

$ django-admin.py migrate auth
$ django-admin.py migrate contentypes
$ django-admin.py migrate sites
$ django-admin.py migrate MY_CUSTOM_USER_APP
$ django-admin.py migrate

where MY_CUSTOM_USER_APP is the name of the application containing the model I set AUTH_USER_MODEL to in my settings file.

Hope it can help. Btw, it seems strange that the best way to synchronize your db in Django 1.8 is so complicated. I wonder if I'm missing something (I'm not very familiar with Django 1.8, I used to work with older versions)

Always migrate db with python manage.py makemigrations and then python manage.py migrate in newer versions. For the error above if first time your are migrating your database then use python manage.py migrate --fake-initial. See docs https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/ref/django-admin/#django-admin-migrate

I had the same problem, and I spent hours banging my head trying to find a solution, which was hidden in the comments. My problem was that CircleCI couldn't run tests because of this error. And I thought I would need to start fresh with a new and empty DB. But I got the same errors. Everything was seemingly related to 'auth', 'contenttypes' and 'sites'.

I read this, and this, as well as this and also this. None were solutions for me.

So after having destroyed my DB and created a new one, the only solution I found to entirely avoid these django.db.utils.ProgrammingError was to:

1. Comment out all code related to the User model.
2. Delete all .pyc files in my project! find . -name "*.pyc" -exec rm -- {} + Thanks @max!
3. run ./manage.py migrate (no fake, no fake-initial, no migration of 'auth' or 'contenttypes' before, juste plain migrate.
4. Uncomment the above code, and run migrate again!

My INSTALLED_APP is the following:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'rest_framework',
    'mptt',
    'djangobower',
    'honeypot',
    'django_hosts',
    'leaflet',
    'multiselectfield',
    'corsheaders',
    'rest_framework_swagger',
    'allauth',
    'allauth.account',
    # 'allauth.socialaccount',
    # 'allauth.socialaccount.providers.twitter',
    # 'allauth.socialaccount.providers.facebook',
    'project.<app_name>',
)

Working on Django 1.10 I found out another solution: My application is named "web", and first I call:

python manage.py makemigrations web

then I call:

python manage.py makemigrations auth

then I call:

python manage.py migrate

Amazed: IT'S WORKING! :) It seems auth was searching for the AUTH_USER_MODEL "web.UserProfile" and a relation named web_user_profile, and it didn't find it, hence the error. On the other hand, calling makemigrations web first creates the required relation first, before auth is able to check and alert it's not there.