Django 1.3.7 TemplateDoesNotExist error admin/index.html

Question

There are numerous questions asked on this site similar to this one, but I couldn't find one that could explain this particular behavior.

I am relatively new to django and ubuntu, so maybe the explanation is simple. This is an old (v1.3.7) django project I'm attempting to migrate to a new server.

Here is the full error I am getting in my apache log:

TemplateDoesNotExist at /admin/
admin/login.html
Request Method: GET
Request URL:    http://131.212.123.7:26080/glrimon/admin/
Django Version: 1.3.7
Exception Type: TemplateDoesNotExist
Exception Value:    
admin/login.html
Exception Location: /.../leave_beave/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/template/loader.py in find_template, line 138
Python Executable:  /.../leave_beave/bin/python

leave_beave is the name of my virtualenv.

Here is the info passed along by the traceback:

Template-loader postmortem

Django tried loading these templates, in this order:
Using loader django.template.loaders.filesystem.Loader:
/glri_mon/siteweb/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
Using loader django.template.loaders.app_directories.Loader:
/glri_mon/siteweb/gps_upload/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/glri_mon/siteweb/siteapp/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/glri_mon/siteweb/glrimon_models/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/glri_mon/siteweb/sdde/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/glri_mon/siteweb/dv/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/glri_mon/siteweb/contains/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/glri_mon/siteweb/sqlwrite/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/.../leave_beave/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cms/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/.../leave_beave/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tinymce/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/.../leave_beave/lib/python2.7/site-packages/mptt/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/.../leave_beave/lib/python2.7/site-packages/menus/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/.../leave_beave/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cms/plugins/text/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/.../leave_beave/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cms/plugins/picture/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/.../leave_beave/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cms/plugins/link/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/.../leave_beave/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cms/plugins/file/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/.../leave_beave/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cms/plugins/snippet/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)
/glri_mon/siteweb/cmsplugin_rst/templates/admin/login.html (File does not exist)

glri_mon is the django project directory. Here's the path to the template in question: /.../leave_beave/django/contrib/admin/templates/admin/index.html. Any thoughts on why django didn't include that path in it's search?

Here are my template loaders from settings.py:

TEMPLATE_LOADERS = (
    'django.template.loaders.filesystem.Loader',
    'django.template.loaders.app_directories.Loader',
#     'django.template.loaders.eggs.Loader',
)

I received this same error for an earlier problem, and I solved it by creating a symlink from the templates directory in question (.../python2.7/site-packages/lib.../package/templates) to my /project_dir/templates directory, which is the one configured as my template directory in settings.py:

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(PATH, 'templates'),
) 

I did this at the time, since I thought it was a one-off hack solution sort of thing, but now I'm getting the same error for attempting to access the admin page of my site (http://.../admin/). This tells me I'm going about this wrong.

I suppose I could add a symlink to every template directory that generates this error, but that doesn't seem like a good idea for a production site.

What am I missing here?

Answer 1

Newer versions of pip will create a wheel for the package, to speed up installation for the next time you use it. However because of this the templates are being installed into the virtual environment root directory.

A workaround to disable wheel creation was added to 1.4.22 - https://github.com/django/django/commit/3b324970e390a6dc4c373db036d6f27300d7fded, however anything before that would've created wheel files which cause problems such as missing templates.

Official support for wheel files was added to 1.5.1 - https://github.com/django/django/commit/4391718f26466f82f943e37368181d5c0520fa35.

With pip version 19, you can skip wheel installation/creation with pip install --no-binary Django Django==1.3.7. Older versions of pip may have slightly different command line arguments.

Answer 2

In the interest of completeness, I solved this issue by explicitly adding the path to the /admin templates to TEMPLATE_DIRS in settings.py:

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    os.path.join(PATH, 'templates'),
    "/.../leave_beave/django/contrib/admin/templates",
)

I doubt this was the intended way of going about this for django 1.3 but it solved my problem.