Django 1.8: Create initial migrations for existing schema

Finally got it to work, although I don’t know why and I hope it will work in the future.
After doing numerous trials and going through Django’s dev site (link).
Here are the steps (for whoever runs into this problem):

1. Empty the django_migrations table: delete from django_migrations;
2. For every app, delete its migrations folder: rm -rf <app>/migrations/
3. Reset the migrations for the “built-in” apps: python manage.py migrate --fake
4. For each app run: python manage.py makemigrations <app>. Take care of dependencies (models with ForeignKey’s should run after their parent model).
5. Finally: python manage.py migrate --fake-initial

After that I ran the last command without the --fake-initial flag, just to make sure.

Now everything works and I can use the migrations system normally.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who encounters this issue. It must be documented better and even simplified.

Update for Django 1.9 users:
I had this scenario again with a Django 1.9.4, and step 5 failed.
All I had to do is replace --fake-initial with --fake to make it work.