Setting Django Environment Variables in a Python Script

Posted: July 15, 2007
Author: Scott Newman
Category: Python, Django

When running Python programs to interact with the Django API, you don't always have the PYTHONPATH and DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE defined.

Before I learned this trick, I used to put my programs inside shell scripts that exported the path and settings variables before running the program. Crude, but effective.

One important thing to remember: If you're using the Django API, you must put these steps in before you try to import any Django elements (views, models, etc.)

To set environment variables:

import os

os.environ['PYTHONPATH'] = '/home/code'
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'myproject.settings'

To add locations to the search path:

import sys

sys.path.append(0, '/home/code')

You can view the search path and environment variables like this:

import sys, os

print sys.path
print os.environ.keys()

Idle Chatter

Scott commented, on October 21, 2007 at 11:20 a.m.:

Since I've written this, James Bennett has posted a great article about this topic on his blog:

http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2007/sep...

Mike Kibbel commented, on November 17, 2007 at 12:38 a.m.:

In the article listed above, James Bennett mentions a method written by Jared Kuolt that sets up Django using the same undocumented function as manage.py.

I've extended Jared's method so that you can properly set up the Django environment in any standalone script with one line of code. Check it out at http://blog.capstrat.com/articles/mak...

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