I recently started a fresh project in Django 1.8 with PostgreSQL. I set everything up and was ready to do my migrations. To my surprise, I got this error: ProgrammingError: relation "auth_user" does not exist.
I had absolutely no fancy stuff that could cause some problem.
I looked around and found out that I was not the only one. Even some issues were opened on this question.
In short, here is how I solved it:
First option is to migrate the model which others depend on, i.e. auth_user and then the rest:
python manage.py migrate auth
python manage.py migrate
Second option is downgrade the Django to 1.7 version and everything should work fine.
I hope this tip will prevent at least somebody from wasting a lot of time like I did.
Fight on!