Upgrading Django 3.2 to Django 4.2

All good things come to an end. Version 4.2 is the new Django LTS-version (Long Term Support) for a popular Python web framework. This is how you can upgrade your project handily with django-upgrade.

Kalle Tolonen
May 17, 2023

Installing Django-upgrade

Install it with pip straight away, or add it to your requirements.txt. Use a virtual environment to be safe and sane.

sudo apt-get install virtualenv

Start up the env.

source env/bin/activate

Install django-upgrade.

pip install django-upgrade

I prefer the requirements.txt-route:

requirements.txt

django===4.2.1
django-upgrade
pip install -r requirements.txt

Using Django-upgrade

Use the command:

django-upgrade --target-version 4.2.1 example/core/models.py example/settings.py

In my case, I needed to upgrade my urls.

django-upgrade --target-version 4.2.1 pathto/urls.py

Worked like a charm and fixed paths and static files on one go!

Verify results

To verify the results, I checked that my setup worked and my dev-server was running great locally and then yolo-pushed the changes to my production server, since it's just this site and it has nothing that a database restore + git can't change back to way it was.

django-admin --version

Actually I had some worries regarding MarkdownX, so I had to mod it's paths a bit to comply with Django 4.2 syntax. Here's the updated urls.py of that plugin for anyone experiencing similar woes:

"""
**MarkdownX** default URLs, to be added to URLs in the main project.

See URLs in :doc:`../../example` to learn more.
"""

from django.urls import path

from .views import (
    ImageUploadView,
    MarkdownifyView,
)


urlpatterns = [
    path('upload/', ImageUploadView.as_view(), name='markdownx_upload'),
    path('markdownify/', MarkdownifyView.as_view(), name='markdownx_markdownify'),
]

Source(s)

1. Django-upgrade on Github