django project root self discovery

Question

Ok so I recall there are some commands you could put in the settings.py file so that basically when you move your django project to another directory it won't get foo-bar'd up.

I know I could just do this by having a string variable everywhere it mentions the home directory but is there a more elegant way of doing this?

Answer 1

The architecture of a project in Django

• root/

  • app1/
  • app2/
  • ...
  • main/
    • settings.py

Inside settings.py:

SITE_ROOT = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__)) -> gives the path of the file settings.py: root/main/. This is NOT THE ROOT OF THE PROJECT

PROJECT_PATH = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__name__)) -> gives the root of the project: root/. This is THE ROOT OF THE PROJECT.

Answer 2

Django 1.8 already includes the project root directory as BASE_DIR:

BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))) 

And you can use it in your app by importing settings:

from django.conf import settings ... ... print(settings.BASE_DIR)