Django DB Settings 'Improperly Configured' Error

Question

You can't just fire up Python and check things, Django doesn't know what project you want to work on. You have to do one of these things:

• Use python manage.py shell
• Use django-admin.py shell --settings=mysite.settings (or whatever settings module you use)
• Set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable in your OS to mysite.settings

• (This is removed in Django 1.6) Use setup_environ in the python interpreter:

  from django.core.management import setup_environ
  from mysite import settings
  
  setup_environ(settings)
  

Naturally, the first way is the easiest.

In your python shell/ipython do:

from django.conf import settings

settings.configure()

In 2017 with django 1.11.5 and python 3.6 (from the comment this also works with Python 2.7):

import django
import os
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "mysite.settings")
django.setup()

The .py in which you put this code should be in mysite (the parent one)

On Django 1.9, I tried django-admin runserver and got the same error, but when I used python manage.py runserver I got the intended result. This may solve this error for a lot of people!

In my case, I got this when trying to run Django tests through PyCharm. I think it is because PyCharm does not load the initial Django project settings, i.e. those that manage.py shell runs initially. One can add them to the start of the testing script or just run the tests using manage.py test.

Versions:

• Python 3.5 (in virtualenv)
• PyCharm 2016.3.2 Professional
• Django 1.10

in my own case in django 1.10.1 running on python2.7.11, I was trying to start the server using django-admin runserver instead of manage.py runserver in my project directory.