Django Project and Standalone Python project

Question

i have the following file structure:

ihe/
├── dcmt
│   ├── actions
│   ├── calendar_observer
│   ├── cms
│   ├── consumption
│   ├── data_mining
│   ├── dcmt
│   ├── dcmt_db
│   ├── dcmt_db.bak.bak
│   ├── dcmt_db.sqlite
│   ├── devices
│   ├── d.py
│   ├── gadgets
│   ├── history 
│   ├── houses
│   ├── hwc_settings
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── __init__.pyc
│   ├── manage.py
│   ├── notifications
│   ├── profitable
│   ├── rules
│   └── schedule
├── hwc
│   ├── configuration
│   ├── daemons
│   ├── database
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── __init__.pyc
│   ├── utils
│   └── wrapper
├── __init__.py
├── __init__.pyc

dcmt is a django project. hwc is pure python. however for instance in hwc/daemons there is a runme.py script. in that runme.py script i want to be able to import the models from the django project. Now as i understand it i have to have the correct python path and then somehow set the django settings. My question is how do i best do this so that for the whole hwc modules I only have to do that once?

Answer 1

Your project structure seems a bit confused.

It's probably not a good idea to have a Django project inside another package hierarchy. A lot of the import paths assume your project is in a top-level package and the only reason you're probably not running into issues already is that Python 2.x still supports relative imports (which have been removed in 3.x). This makes references to packages very ambiguous and can cause weird bugs.

From what I can see your settings package is actually called (fully-qualified) ihe.dcmt.hwc_settings. If ihe is in your Python path (check the value of sys.path in the script you're trying to run), that (i.e. the fully-qualified path) is probably what DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE should point at.

If you want to hook into Django's functionality in your scripts, you might want to look into the documentation for writing manage.py commands. This would let you write Django-related scripts more consistently and save you the worry about referencing and initialising Django's settings correctly yourself.