I have a rather complex K8s environment that one of the Deployments is a Django application. Currently we are having a very hard time whenever I need to update a model that has already been migrated to a PostgreSQL database.

Let's say for instance that I create an application named Sample, that has a simple table on the models.py. My development process (skaffold) builds the docker and apply it locally on the minikube, after this is done I connect to the pod via kubectl exec and execute the python manage.py makemigrations and python manage.py migrate, so far so good.

After some time, let's say I need to create a new table on the models.py file of the Sample application, the skaffold builds the docker, kills the old pod, and create the new pod. So I connect as usual via kubectl exec and try to execute the makemigrations and migrate command, lo and behold, there's no migration to apply. And of course no change is made on the PostgreSQL.

Upon further searching this, I believe that the reason for this is that since the docker is built without the Sample/migrations folder, and there's already a table (the original one) on the PostgreSQL, when I run the makemigrations it creates only the 0001_initial.py file, that has all the tables but, since the table already exists, when executing the migratethe django believes that the migration is already applied, therefore it won't apply.

If what I found out is true, how can I keep this files on a PVC, so that they are always kept between each pod recreation?

Thank you.