For (1) The simplest is probably just running a Django management command - maybe from a cron job. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the kind of task you have in

For (1) The simplest is probably just running a Django management command - maybe from a cron job. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the kind of task you have in mind? For (2) - you seem to be saying "if you don't want Django to handle migrations then you lose the benefit of Django handling migrations" - but again I might have missed some subtlety here?