# make makemigrations work again

In Django, the recommended standard is to push the **migrations** folder of (an app) also to git.

Initially I never used to push migration files to GitHub and I ended up having to do `python make migrations` as well as `python manage.py migrate` on the server - whether it was manually or via a pipeline.

There was one common pitfall to this which I stumbled on many times only to figure it out later - this post is to remind me of how to come out of that pit.

`python mange.py makemigrations` would always say “No changes detected” even when you had a model in a brand new app.

<mark>Note:</mark> This is only relevant to new Django ‘apps’ created (or pulled from Git) - if you had already done **makemigrations** and **migrate** on an app previously and it worked then running the same for the second time would work. The reason why it doesn’t work for the first time is because Django looks for a migrations folder and the `__init__.py` file in the **migrations** folder for *makemigrations* to work.

Goto to the app, say it be **booking** and create a migrations folder and create an empty `__init__.py` file in it. Now run `python mange.py makemigrations`, it should work as expected.

```bash
cd booking
mkdir migrations
cd migrations
touch __init__.py
cd ../..
python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate
```