django-heralder has missing migrations when `DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD` is not `django.db.models.AutoField`

[b-ggs]

Steps to reproduce:

• Install Django==4.1.6 and django-heralder==0.3.0
• Start a new Django 4.1.6 project with django-admin startproject project_name
• Verify that the default value for settings.DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD in the newly generated Django project is django.db.models.BigAutoField
• Add herald and django.contrib.sites to INSTALLED_APPS
• Run ./manage.py makemigrations

Expected result:

Makemigrations would output that there are no changes detected.

Actual result:

A new migration is created with the following contents:

$ cat venv/lib/python3.11/site-packages/herald/migrations/0006_alter_notification_id_alter_sentnotification_id.py
# Generated by Django 4.1.6 on 2023-02-06 18:55

from django.db import migrations, models


class Migration(migrations.Migration):

    dependencies = [
        ('herald', '0005_auto_20180516_1755'),
    ]

    operations = [
        migrations.AlterField(
            model_name='notification',
            name='id',
            field=models.BigAutoField(auto_created=True, primary_key=True, serialize=False, verbose_name='ID'),
        ),
        migrations.AlterField(
            model_name='sentnotification',
            name='id',
            field=models.BigAutoField(auto_created=True, primary_key=True, serialize=False, verbose_name='ID'),
        ),
    ]

[peterfarrell]

This is to be expected -- Django changed the default_auto_field to BigAutoField when generating a new app however the current default for backwards compatibility in settings is still AutoField.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/releases/3.2/#customizing-type-of-auto-created-primary-keys

Maintaining the historical behavior, the default value for DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD is AutoField. Starting with 3.2 new projects are generated with DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD set to BigAutoField. Also, new apps are generated with AppConfig.default_auto_field set to BigAutoField. In a future Django release the default value of DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD will be changed to BigAutoField.

To avoid unwanted migrations in the future, either explicitly set DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD to AutoField:

DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD = 'django.db.models.AutoField'

[b-ggs]

Yep, that is what I did for a newly generated Django project that used django-heralder.

It would be great if you consider adding an app-level default_auto_field so if users decide that they would prefer DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD to be a different kind of field other than AutoField, django-heralder's models would not be affected.

The folks over at Wagtail and Django-CMS have it set up that way so their core models' primary keys are independently configured from the user's project's settings.

[peterfarrell]

I no longer help maintain this project because don't reliably have the ability to release on PyPi anymore. At DjangoCon US 2022 sprints, a group of us forked the project to Django-Heralder so we could do releases for bug fixes.

I created an issue that regarding what we are discussing here:

#30

We welcome a PR that set the default_auto_field at the application level for Django-Heralder.

Heralder is also on PyPI - v.0.3.0 is equivalent to Django-Herald 0.3.0:

https://pypi.org/project/django-heralder/

[peterfarrell]

@b-ggs - totally got confused on which project I was commenting on -- this is Heralder... sigh

[peterfarrell]

@b-ggs Your PR has been merged. Thanks for much for the contribution!