Sometimes, you don't have direct access to the database and so can't rely on Django creating tables with syncdb.

Normally, you can run

$ ./manage.py sql appname

To generate the SQL to create tables for the appname app.

I was looking at the documentation and trying to work out how to do this for the standard Django tables such as auth_user and django_site. ./manage.py sql django.contrib.auth didn't work, giving:

Error: App with label django.contrib.auth could not be found. Are you sure your INSTALLED_APPS setting is correct?

Thanks to the ever-helpful Django mailing list I was able to find out quickly how to do this.

I needed to run the following commands to generate the create table (and sequence - I was using Oracle) scripts required:

$ ./manage.py sql auth
$ ./manage.py sql sites
$ ./manage.py sql sessions
$ ./manage.py sql admin
$ ./manage.py sql contenttypes